Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to start off in thanking my colleagues who worked hard on this. I know it was not an easy thing, travelling to communities and staying away from your families for the summer.

I will start off with saying to the Department of Transportation, Finance, the Cabinet, I think they went about the strategies and their plan the wrong way. I think they should have shared it with us before they started going out there and force it down the throats of the public. I would have been happy to assist them in their planning. I am sure others would have been. The public out there would have been. A strategy that they started ten years ago, which may have looked good ten years ago, is not a strategy that everybody agrees with right now. The priorities and the areas, the highways which they identified, did not make sense, where you had to ask the public that do not have any highways to pay for part of the highway so they can go to Yellowknife and the Ingraham Trail, or even to go to the Fort Smith chip seal. There is no industry out there. Why should industry pay for that highway? It does not make sense.

I have talked to industry and industry said if they want to toll the mining companies, then put a toll on Highway No. 3. If they want to toll the oil and gas, put a highway toll on the Liard Highway. Wherever there is industry, toll those roads if you want to identify them.

Transportation has said, "Well, we are going to give back rebates and exemptions and all that." It does not make sense. Why do you want to take from them and a year later give it back to them? That is a lot of money to take out of one household, over $500 for the whole year, and make them pay for a year and then give it back to them a year later. That is a lot of money to take out of one household.

The thing I do not understand is why are they saying we have to use the highway toll? Why are they not in Ottawa looking for money? I know the excuse the last few weeks has been because of the September 11th happenings in the United States. I know that is a good excuse, but you cannot just fall on that and say we cannot do anything. We are not going to get anything unless you keep trying. You have to keep trying. It says that in here. You should be going to the federal government and trying to get your money from there. There are programs out there. If you have resources on the Ingraham Trail, then the federal government can pay for part of that. You have proven that by going to Ottawa and getting bridges for the Mackenzie/Sahtu area. You have proven that it can be done. Why are we not looking at that? That was not looked at.

Also, I have a document here from the Akaitcho and the Dogribs in Rae -- one alternative way of building that road and saving the government money. This was not looked at. This was never even brought into proposal. Those are things that we should have looked at. We did not do that.

The other one that I brought up earlier is about unforeseen revenues that we get from the federal government or from the taxes in the Territories. Who should be identifying these kind of projects for that? We knew we were getting it two years ago. We knew we were going to get it last year and we know we are getting it this year. We should have identified some of this money for that. We did not do that. We just keep continuing with the toll and trying to force it down everyone's throat.

By doing this, we are going to ask, because the government is paying for about, I understand, 40 percent of all the goods and services that will be crossing the Territories -- the fuel, housing, all that -- we are going to have to give more money to the communities. We are going to have to give more money to the municipalities. We are going to have to subsidize power a lot more.

If you look at it and you weigh that against the amount of money that will be paid towards a private company in building the roads for us, like the Dogribs and the Akaitcho, then it weighs itself. It is pretty well equal. The increases we are going to have to give to these communities is going to even itself out.

So on one hand, we are going to increase everything. On the other hand, we will make them pay. It does not seem logical that we can do these things. By putting a tax on everything, we are taxing ourselves. We are looking at that old strategy where it says we have to borrow so much money, we have to pay the percentage and all that and then you look at a proposal like this and maybe there could be more out there where they could save us more money. We do not pay money for the next two years. We have a debt wall looming in front of us and we are not even looking at proposals like this. We should be. You are trying to save money for us, save money for the North.

So all in all, I am saying this was not well planned. It was not planned by everyone in the Territories who are involved. We ignored the outlying communities where there are no highways. We have not identified anything in the strategy for them. If we are going to make them pay, we should give them something back and that is not happening. Like I said, the priorities and the strategies do not work for me. Thank you.