Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I just wanted to address this issue of process. There has been some concern, and we have heard this for the last couple of weeks, about the lack of process some Members feel that the Social Programs committee and the government embarked on.

Members feel very strongly about this issue one way or another, Mr. Speaker, and I do not expect to be able to stand up here and change any of that, so I simply wanted to let Members and the public know how we went about the consultation process.

As you know, Mr. Speaker, on certain bills, there is not a public process. We wanted to gauge the level of interest in hearing from the committee on this bill, so we advertised across the Territories, asked people to write in, present us with written submissions on their views on this piece of legislation, and we sent them a package -- a plain language version of the legislation explaining exactly what this did do and what this did not do.

I think one of the questions that kept coming back to my office was this concern the people were somehow not aware that gay people currently do and can adopt, so that was one of the things that we had to straighten out, and this legislation was not going to do anything to change something of that nature, Mr. Speaker.

So after the plain language summaries went out, we received a number of submissions. As for concern about the fact that we did not go to public consultation outside of Yellowknife, we made the offer in the package that we sent to the many people who picked them up, suggesting to them that if they wanted to hear from us in their community, to let us know. That did not happen, Mr. Speaker.

I feel we have done what we needed to do to make that offer. There was a request from Yellowknife, a number of people asking us to host a public forum on issues to be debated. We felt that really was not the role of the committee in our system, but certainly we were not going to take away from the ability of any other interest groups in the community to host their own debate on this issue.

So after making that offer and not receiving a request, Mr. Speaker, we felt we had enough information from the submissions made -- they were very clear and well-articulated, the points were pretty much black and white. We felt we have enough to make a decision and enough to go on. That is why we did not end up going out to various other communities to host public hearings. Thank you.