Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Also, obviously Mr. Chairman I support the committee's report and recommendations. I think that after seeing this report of the Auditor General the things that I felt had probably happened were confirmed. I will admit I was not surprised. We had a lot of indication of much of this behind closed doors yet we were unable to get the answers and responses to any of these questions in public because of the government's insistence and assertion that there were privacy issues that would come to bear here, therefore we needed to go to the Auditor General and uncover this and bring these issues forward so that they could see the light of day.

I think that the Auditor General in stating that further, "We found no justification for paying the significantly higher termination payments and benefits." I think that that is the issue that much of the public is concerned about. I have had people call me and say, "How can you arrange a termination payout and contract for one individual that does not conform to their employment contract?" It is unprecedented. This government has not done it before; paid huge amounts of money over and above what was warranted in the contract and then said to me "Surely to God some laws were broken."

I think that is the really concerning thing here, Mr. Chairman. No laws were broken. There is so much power concentrated in the office of our Premier that they have the ability to crumple up existing contracts and rewrite them. They only have to be willing to sign them. It is a huge responsibility, the job of Premier and Mr. Chairman, certainly not something that we take lightly. We have to put a great deal of faith and trust in that individual that they will use that power and that authority wisely.

I think the Auditor General has clearly shown us that this was not a prudent use of funds and it was only allowed to happen because it could, Mr. Chairman, not because it was justified.

I think the more we go through this and the more we dissect it, we realize that so much of it is about bad decisions everywhere. Were the bad decisions made by staff, or were they made by the Premier? Did the Premier receive bad advice on a number of occasions? I have no reason to doubt that. I continue to see what I believe to be bad advice coming forward to our government in dealing with this situation even now.

This agenda of deflecting the real issue and trying to refute and counter anything that the Auditor General has found and discovered in my mind makes no sense, and is exactly the political opposite of what we should be doing.

Mr. Chairman, if you look at the issue of anticipated liability, our government says we had to pay a whack of money over and above what was entitled in a contract because we felt that the former chief of staff might be able to sue us for wrongful dismissal. For some reason, we were not concerned about Mr. Bayly's ability to do that, just Ms. Sorensen's. This, Mr. Chairman, is despite the fact that we know the position was at-pleasure. The Auditor General refers to that as well, when she says "At-pleasure appointments are positions that may be terminated by the employer at any time, with or without cause," Mr. Chairman. Despite that, we saw fit to pay, in this one instance, a lot of money over and above what was entitled to that individual in the contract. Furthermore, we had no legal representation, nobody looking out for the public's best interests in these negotiations. It makes you wonder if our government thought that Ms. Sorensen's lawyer, who obviously did a very good job, was also looking out for the public interest. I think we can clearly see that there is no way to reconcile those two interests. If that is indeed what our government thought, it is embarrassing, Mr. Chairman.

If we look at the issue of performance pay, we know from listening to the Auditor General's staff yesterday that the Premier provided the direction to Ms. Snider to pay maximum performance pay to both Mr. Bayly and Ms. Sorensen, despite the fact that they had letters of reprimand on file. When we asked for clarification, the Auditor General's indication was that he was told that they had done a great job, but there were no specifics as to the objectives they had met or anything like this, no discussion of the criteria they had met in order to warrant, and this is important, maximum performance pay, Mr. Chairman.

I think the message that sends to the public of the Northwest Territories, and indeed all public servants, is certainly the wrong one. Clearly we do not consider criteria, never mind documentation. There is no way it could have ever been even considered, Mr. Chairman, if we are going to indicate that these two individuals deserved maximum performance pay.

So the fact that the termination contract was absolutely not linked to the employment contract in the former chief of staff's situation, is unprecedented. We have not seen this before in the Northwest Territories. Certainly the Auditor General did not uncover this in any of her research in looking at past contracts, and there was no indication from our staff to the Auditor General's office that this was something we normally do, because quite clearly, Mr. Chairman, this is something that we normally do not do.

I think I have also spoken to the fact that now, in the aftermath of this report, we continue to see bad decisions being made, and I think these ones are bad political decisions. We know that our government is out there trying to refute and counter just about everything that the Auditor General has found. Late in the game, after they had an indication of what was coming out in the Auditor General's report, they hustled together an internal legal opinion without even...the legal opinion was written without even seeing the Auditor General's report. There are all kinds of problems in it. It refers to clauses in Ms. Sorensen's contract that do not even exist, Mr. Chairman. I guess that is not surprising, given that not all of the information was present when this legal opinion was written.

It even goes so far as to refer and try to make the case for deputy minister benefits being paid in Ms. Sorensen's case. It indicates that for the purposes of her agreement, where it says deputy minister, we are talking about Ms. Sorensen. We know in the House, Mr. Chairman, clearly both the Premier and the Finance Minister have suggested that, and I am quoting now from October 31st Hansard, page 635. This is the Premier: "We also created a chief of staff position. The chief of staff position is in fact an executive assistant position that has additional responsibilities."

I mean, this legal opinion basically refutes what both our Premier and Finance Minister have said in Hansard. That was October 31, 2001, I believe. I just think that continually, we seem to make political indiscretions here that seem certainly not prudent.

We talk about net present values of paying Ms. Sorensen in a spread-out fashion as opposed to a lump sum and indicate that this probably saved us money. This is absolutely false, Mr. Chairman. The way we paid out this money, not only did it make us susceptible to further legal liability if there are disability issues, but it pays out additional benefits and allows for more and more pension to be grossed up by extending the length of employment. There is no way that, if the proper information was provided to this person who wrote the legal opinion, they could ever have said that when you look at the time value of money, that this was a cheaper way to do it. You cannot just discount back to the present some future cash flows and ignore the ones you do not want to talk about, Mr. Chairman. That is just craziness. The fact that this was presented to Mr. Voytilla's office and still managed to make it out of that office is something that amazes me.

Mr. Chairman, I do have many, many concerns, I guess, as we go through the Auditor General's report. I think Mr. Braden has put it fairly succinctly, and I think we disagree on one point. He indicates that it is probably warranted for us to ask the Premier to step aside because of his involvement, but he feels it would be more detrimental to us going forward to have a change of Premier. I agree with Mr. Braden, except to say that I think if we do not have a change of Premier, we will be mired in this discussion and conflict for some time to come, and absolutely be stuck and not able to carry on and go forward and achieve the good things we need to. Thank you.