Mr. Speaker, we had an initial meeting with Finance Minister Manley last week in Ottawa and following our initial meeting with the negotiator Mr. Peterson, we raised our concern that the Aboriginal Summit leaders are also involved in this process and the intention of this Intergovernmental Forum was to talk about devolution as well as resource revenue sharing. This was brought to the attention of Manley. He is fully aware of it. We intend to follow up with a letter from our Finance Minister to Manley to pursue that initiative.
This initial meeting, I think it was very positive. It got to his attention that we are very concerned about this and that we need to have someone from Finance Canada at this table along with David Peterson. Mr. Manley indicated that he will not delegate his authority of Finance Canada over to Canada to talk about net fiscal benefit, so there is a potential problem.
The other problem that we see is that in the Northwest Territories this Intergovernmental Forum is a government-to-government-to-government process with the federal government, the territorial government and the aboriginal governments. In the eyes of Minister Manley, his preference is to deal with the territorial government as a bilateral arrangement. That is a problem because our view here is that the aboriginal government want to participate equally with us with Finance Canada on this resource revenue sharing. So it is another area where we have some concern, a serious concern. Thank you.