Thank you, Mr. Lafferty. The honourable Minister responsible for the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, Mr. Antoine.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Supplementary, Mr. Lafferty.

Thank you, Mr. Lafferty. The honourable Minister responsible for the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, Mr. Antoine.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Supplementary, Mr. Lafferty.

Thank you, Mr. Lafferty. This is the area of gun control, I suspect? Thank you. The honourable Minister responsible for the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, Mr. Antoine.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Final supplementary, Mr. Lafferty.

Thank you, Mr. Lafferty. The honourable Minister responsible for the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, Mr. Antoine.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Item 7, oral questions. The honourable Member for Deh Cho, Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member's statement, I indicated that most of the smaller communities have limited access to information and services. We heard Mr. Lafferty and I spoke to the same issue about registering guns. We have difficulty in our smaller communities. We do not have the court workers. We do not have a lot of the different functions that are mostly, in my case, located in Fort Simpson or in Hay River or in Ottawa or in Yellowknife.

If you want to register guns, just to get the application form is a difficulty. We do not have a phone or Internet service. The seniors have always indicated they have problems with their old-age security applications. There is nobody in the communities to help them, or to even access a court worker or a legal aid service. You have to try to find some way for them to place a call in a lot of cases. It is using our phones as MLAs to contact public trustees, or even in the case of me being situated in Yellowknife during session, a lot of my constituents have a hard time faxing me because there are no fax machines readily available.

I would like to ask the Premier if he would consider assessing those communities with limited or costly access to information or services to determine what could be done to assist them. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Premier, Mr. Kakfwi.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I understand the legislation, it creates quite a cumbersome process from what existed previously. You need to become quite knowledgeable with firearms and be able to fill out an extensive form, provide some very detailed information, take a test, before you can get a firearms license, and then also proceed to register every firearm that you have, and make sure that we have these available whenever and wherever you go with these.

The cost of implementing that is far beyond what the federal government had originally estimated, and so they have relinquished the field to no one. They simply have withdrawn and fled their responsibilities. The difficulty, as sympathetic as we are to the plight in the communities, is does this Legislature want us to expend money to take over a responsibility that is not our responsibility? If so, to what extent do you want that done? If there is a discussion that needs to be undertaken here, then we are prepared to have that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Premier. Supplementary, Mr. McLeod.

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure what question the Premier is responding to. It may be a question I asked several days ago. My question was if he would assess the communities on how they could, especially the ones with limited or costly access to information services, how we could improve that. I was not asking a question specifically on the gun law. I was asking about how we could assist them with asking about how we could assist them in accessing court workers, trustees, legal aid, even their MLAs, and all these different positions would have a position or a mechanism. That was my question, not on gun control.

Mr. McLeod, yes, I have no control over how the Minister answers, but could you just re-ask the question in a little more concise manner, of the Minister? Mr. McLeod.

Mr. Speaker, I cannot ask the question without repeating my preamble.

-- Laughter

To form the question, Mr. Speaker, in my Member's statement, I indicated smaller communities have limited access to information and services. We have difficulties accessing legal aid or court workers or medical assistance. I did mention firearms offices in the south.

My question was to the Premier, if he would be willing to assess those communities that have limited or no access, or costly access, to information and services and see what could be done to assist them.

Thank you for your clarification. The honourable Premier, Mr. Kakfwi.