Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a question about the Minister's opening comments, but before that, in response to questions from Mr. Miltenberger, the Premier launched into a discussion about the recent motion in the House on the Public Service Commission, and talked about how Cabinet was prepared to bring information forward to Inuvik and share that.

I have to say, what sort of commitment is there, really, for involvement, if the campaign has already started to say that it is too expensive, because that is certainly what it sounded like to me.

The Premier mentioned the cost in the Yukon. Well, you may want to do some research, because the cost in Manitoba is millions of dollars less than it is in the Yukon. There is an incredible range of costs that you could get into with something like this. I do not think that starting the campaign now to say that it is too expensive is a realistic way to say we are working together to examine our priorities.

For instance, in the Yukon, $2 million of the $10 million is for staff development, not just $250,000 like we have put into staff development, and $2 million of their $10 million goes into Workers' Compensation Board payments. Those are the costs that we are going to have in any case, so they are not necessarily costs that are in excess from running a Public Service Commission. In fact, if you look at the Financial Management Board Secretariat, under labour relations and compensation services, without those two expenses, which amount to $4 million, we are already budgeting $8.5 million.

I think we need to go into this with an open mind and recognize that one of the primary reasons for wanting to push for this was to make sure that we had an independent agency, one that the public had confidence in, that was not subject to political pressure and one that would follow the political direction of this Legislature in implementing its policies, but would not be subject to the whims of an individual politician.

Mr. Chairman, I had not intended to go into that, but I had to respond to the Premier's comments.

In his opening comments, he refers to one initiative which is not in the budget, so I would like to just follow up on that before we get to detail. The rest of my concerns, I can follow up there. In his opening comments, on page 8, he announces that the Government of the NWT is committed to funding $333,000, or one third of the 2000-2001 cost of $1 million, for aboriginal government participation in the Intergovernmental Forum.

I am just wondering if the government has looked at whether or not this could perhaps put us in a situation where the argument could now be made, and it is one that we had resisted until now, that this government bears some responsibility for the implementation costs of self-government. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.