Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Like my colleagues today, I will support the motion and rise today to speak to that, but I won't stand here and reiterate all of the concerns that my colleagues have so ably raised already. I will point to a couple of things that particularly have distressed me.

The process -- and I have raised a number of concerns about the process in the House -- that was undertaken by RWED and looking at the revisions, there were a number of times that consultations were done and it was made very clear that they were only information sessions, not consultations. I know the people who were present at a number of these meetings and have talked to me about this, felt that their input really wasn't being considered, really wasn't being valued and that they were simply being advised of something that was coming down the pipe and there was nothing they could do to get out of the way.

There were a number of arguments also made about some of the particularly controversial aspects of the revisions. I will say that there are some things that generally seem to have good support. I don't think anybody would argue, it seems to make sense to ask people to file taxes in the Northwest Territories if they are going to receive this benefit, but some of the other ones, for instance, the thresholds. If we accept the argument that the thresholds were based on the need to comply with the agreement on internal trade, and that was the point put to us, Mr. Speaker, at the technical briefings and if we accept that, Mr. Speaker, it raises a lot of questions. I know that the department indicated we have a reporting requirement under the AIT to lay out the amount of contracts that we have over and above and under certain cutoffs but, Mr. Speaker, reporting requirement is simply not the same thing as suggesting that we have to implement new thresholds and can't have the BIP applied to an amount over that, and that is simply not the same thing.

Mr. Speaker, another provision that causes a lot of problems, and I think Members are certainly getting a lot of feedback on this, are the audit requirements. I am not sure and I think departments are now slowly aware of this, but the audit requirements, much of them, of this requirement will be hoisted onto departments because RWED has clearly laid out the case that they believe a number of the concerns become contract administration concerns and not BIP concerns. I think for us to fully understand these implications, we have to look at something like the northern labour premium that would be applied to contracts. We question why this premium wouldn't be at the back end of a contract. After a contractor has demonstrated they had used northern labour and can prove it, then we will give them the premium. RWED is insisting on a model that pays the premium up front but the audit requirement will be on the department administering the contract.

Mr. Speaker, I have talked to a number of people in departments who have said that they just don't have the capability of being able to do this on any kind of a consistent basis. So I think we are kidding ourselves to think that we will have an effective audit requirement in place in 10 or 11 or 12 or 13 short days from now. Mr. Speaker, it simply is not realistic. I think Members have really laid out a number of concerns that they have throughout the whole process, and we thought we had an agreement from the Minister to analyze the situation and get us some data after a year of tracking this and that is why we agreed to support the Minister going forward with the contract administration portion of the policy. It seemed to make sense to us that if you are going to collect this data, that is certainly not something we want to stop because we'd like to have an informed discussion about the business incentive policy and what the current policy does cost us. Mr. Dent laid this out and we wrote a letter to the Minister saying for all we know, we don't even need a BIP anymore, but how do we know? Without analyzing the data, without hearing from the department, admittedly, the department acknowledges that they don't know what it costs and we can't have an informed discussion about what we have in place and what makes sense.

So, Mr. Speaker, with all of these questions out there, I don't think that we can allow these changes to go forward as the department has proposed. The department might be right, it might be wrong, it might be partially right or wrong, none of us knows and I think that is a dangerous way to conduct ourselves. In the Minister's commitment in the House in the past and now a seeming reversal on that, but I am sure technically he can find a way to walk through that commitment and indicate that at the time he made those statements they were accurate, and I am sure they were, but I think that he knows that we believe the spirit of his comments are not being adhered to now and that is certainly concerning, especially when there are so many people out there looking to poke holes in our consensus system and talk about the death now of consensus government. These are the kinds of things that further back that up and that really concerns me. I think we have a very effective system, but it's only as effective as the players who are involved in this House. I think we owe it to ourselves, as stewards of the consensus system, to treat each other with more respect and dignity and adhere to the true spirit of consensus, and we aren't doing that in this case, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.

---Applause