Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I would just like to quickly say that when Mr. McLeod made his presentation, he talked about ammonia nitrate and I forgot to respond to it, so quickly, we understand the situation. We have to work with the Department of Transportation, MACA and RWED. RWED is responsible for the environment, so we need to -- I have also met with the mayor of Enterprise, so we are working on it. I guess the problem there was that nobody in the government or industry that was responsible for this ammonium nitrate notified the community that this ammonium nitrate was stored in the community. We will have to look at that and make sure that in the future, dangerous goods are well advertised and explained well to the communities, whenever the stuff is going through their community.

The other one was in regard to capital plans for the Deh Cho. I just recently sent off a letter to the honourable Member for Deh Cho regarding some of the concerns with parks and the funding for the different programs. I think I would like to leave it at that.

Regarding the honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko's concern with oil and gas, again, yes, I hear what he is saying. As the Government of the Northwest Territories we undertook a project called the Mackenzie Valley development project. This project was formed as a senior level working group. This steering committee of the Mackenzie Valley development project is coordinating the preparation for the development of oil and gas in the Mackenzie and Liard areas. This group meets regularly to update on activity in the oil and gas sector.

There is a Mackenzie Valley development project division now within the Department of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development that coordinates a wide range of activities, as directed by the steering committee.

We do work with the aboriginal partnerships. This key area supports business development, human resource development benefits and technical negotiations. To date we have contributed to about four different aboriginal organizations for this purpose, namely the IRC, the Gwich'in Tribal Council, the Sahtu Secretariat Incorporated, and various communities in the Deh Cho also benefited from this arrangement.

One initiative in this area that is in the final development is the Fort Liard assessment project. This assessment looked at the six key areas of development impacts over the past several years in Fort Liard. Like I mentioned earlier, Fort Liard has gone through some oil and gas in the last six years and this Fort Liard assessment project is on the request of the community to take an assessment of what has happened to the community in terms of oil and gas, how it was approached and what the benefits and problems are. That can be used in other areas that will be getting into oil and gas activity.

We have been doing that work. In human resource development, we work with Education, Culture and Employment in developing programs for both entry level and more advanced positions in the oil and gas sector. There have been initiatives over the past year including safety orientation programs offered at regional community levels. We also worked on the Inuvik rig training program that was initiated through the Mackenzie Valley development project. We have supported rig training for various communities in the Deh Cho.

Various allocations through the Maximizing Northern Employment program are directed towards training people in the North for jobs in the oil and gas sector. This includes projects in the private sector and partnership with the aboriginal development corporations and worker mobility programs. We have helped out in this in paying for workers from one community to move into the job and so forth. There is work going on through this government in trying to address some of the issues in oil and gas. We are not just sitting back and letting all this development happen around us. There is a plan we are putting in place and we are working with it.

As for financing projects, there are some different projects that come on stream and as the different corporations and organizations from the community want to get involved we have programs in place that will look at helping them finance these projects so they will have some equity participation in some of these projects.

We are also looking at the Mackenzie Valley pipeline application processes, keeping an eye on that. There is a western Northwest Territories biophysical study consortium that this Mackenzie Valley development process has a lead role in. This one here, we will be looking at all the work and research that has been done on our environment to date. Wherever there are gaps we need to do more baseline study. This biophysical study consortium of aboriginal organizations, industry, environmental groups, our government as well as the federal government have been asked to participate in this. This will be similar to the West Kitikmeot/Slave study that has taken place quite successfully northeast of here in the diamond area, the barren lands there.

We are also looking at health and social services impacts of development. A working group has been organized to determine requirements so we are better prepared for the health and social impacts of development.

Another thing this Mackenzie Valley development project provides is information for services for government departments, community groups, other interested parties, and we work jointly with the Department of Transportation to try and identify what kinds of pressures are going to be on our transportation system and try to prepare for the impacts that are associated with it.

This Mackenzie Valley development project is a coordinated approach formed by a senior level working group to coordinate our preparation for oil and gas development in the Mackenzie and Liard sector.

The honourable Member also talked about vacancies in this department. There are 60 positions not filled, I am told. Looking closely at it, about 30 of them are seasonal positions. They are not permanent. It is for summer fire fighting seasons. The other positions are filled with summer students. Some of the positions were kept open for flexibility for the department.

I guess we should take a look at these positions to identify the real positions, to try and clean it up and perhaps whatever positions that are not real positions, we are going to eliminate them so there is a clear understanding of what positions are there. Thank you.