Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am not going to say too much on this here to hold things up, but I have to say a few things with regard to the amount of money that we are spending, both with the Hydro Secretariat and the Energy Secretariat. For me, I have to go back to representing my constituents and the people who elected me to come here. They are watching how we spend our money.

I agree. I think we have to look at ways of generating revenues for the government, for the people of the Territories and for communities. However, when I look at the amount of money that we are spending in the name of energy and how many different groups are actually spending money under the name of energy, with no exact amount as to how or where it is going, the fundamental question we have is that we do not even know if we are ready for development, if everybody is in agreement and that we are going to get anything at the end of this.

If all we want to do is consult with communities and find out if everyone is in agreement to proceed with hydro development, I do not see where that would take the amount that we are talking about here. Today, when I get a call saying that a licensed play school that has been in operation for a number of years and has been fighting this government for over two years trying to get a little bit of funding so that she can stay open and keep it to service a community, when they are looking after 19 kids and she is finally closing her doors on December 12th because she cannot access any dollars from this government because we do not have money. We do not have any money to address our kids' needs and here we are spending millions on looking at something that might generate revenue for the Territories.

I think that somewhere along the line, we have to be very conscious of providing some services to the needs that we have today. This is going to increase the cost of living. It is cutting back on our services and I really do believe that we have a large number of organizations right now that are going around consulting. We have the Intergovernmental Forum and we have every aboriginal group talking about where they want to go and how they want to develop their territory.

I think there are vehicles in place right now that we can get the answers that we want. I think a lot of the money we are spending would be spent by business, by big business. If we tell them we are ready for business, they will come and they will do a lot of the work that we are saying we are spending money on right now. I do not think we have to spend the money on the business end of it. We are not going to be able to do the business anyway. Every one of those businesses are too big for our government to take on and fund. I think business would look after that expense. All we have to do is tell them we are ready, get policy in place, legislation, what do we want to make from it, how much do we want for our aboriginal governments, how much do we want for our government. I do not see that costing $2.6 million or $3 million.

I do think that our communities are in big need of funds. That $2.6 million, or $1 million even, would go a long way to satisfying some of the needs that we have with our kids that we say we want to promote and we want to give our kids a good start in life. When I hear that we have to shut operations down in our communities because we have no money, I have a hard time looking at spending these kinds of funds in just consultation. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.