Mr. Speaker, thank you. I am rising to speaking in favour of the motion. My colleagues have covered a lot of ground on this, all of which I agree and concur with. I would especially like to compliment Mr. Bell on his discussion about the need to adhere to the principles of consensus, and how we need to work at making the system work.

The point that I would like to underscore, Mr. Speaker -- I'm sure it's been covered to some extent but is a very significant one to me -- is that initiatives at this time are essentially ones of economic benefit or economic influence in our society and in the way we do business. Unless we have ways to easily and reliably and consistently measure what the impact is of these kinds of initiatives, they really become very difficult ones for MLAs to take responsibility for, Mr. Speaker. How can I really know that the taxpayer or the government is getting fair measure for any kind of incentive or benefit program like this if we can't measure it?

On the other side of the coin, Mr. Speaker, how can I be assured that the business community, the business owners and distributors are genuinely receiving something that enables them to continue business in the North that would otherwise potentially make it impossible or at best very marginal for them to be here? So that's essentially the only point that I wanted to make, Mr. Speaker, was that it's so important, it's of growing importance to the taxpayers who are seeing this across the country to be able to measure what we do to be able to know how significant it is and to know what kind of value we're getting for it.

This is something that has been absent in the old BIP. I don't see much evidence of it at all in the new one, and until some kind of mechanism comes along that all sides in this debate can agree on, we can't get by with arbitrary yardsticks or criteria here. We have to have measuring sticks that all sides can agree to use. This is going to be an impossible piece of work to really assess its impact. So until we have that piece of work in hand, Mr. Speaker, this initiative will not receive my support. Thank you.

---Applause