Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I just want to go on record stating that I support this bill. For a number of years I sat as a council member in the community of Fort Providence. We raised issues and we raised concerns that we didn't have enough authority and we didn't have the tools to do a lot of the things we wanted to do. We would look at our goals and objectives and a lot of them were out of our reach because we had no mechanism, no way to really do a lot of the things we wanted to do. We raised concern at that time to anybody who would listen. We went to a lot of meetings, not only myself but many of the councillors who were on the hamlet council of Fort Providence at the time, and it seemed like nobody was listening. So I was quite happy to see this whole bill come about. We weren't sure it was going to get to this point. It took a long time and it took a lot of work to make it become a reality.

With this bill, the communities that it affects in my riding are the community of Fort Providence and Kakisa. I don't believe the reserve is affected. But one of the communities that really had a lot of involvement and really wanted to see changes to legislation was Enterprise. Unfortunately they were not part of this as this bill does not apply to the settlements. I really encourage the department to make note of the motion that was put on the table by Mr. Roland and bring forward the appropriate amendments early in the life of the next Assembly.

I certainly welcome the new responsibilities that come with this bill, the new authority. My only concern would be if this bill adds more responsibilities and with more responsibilities comes more costs. I'm just hoping that we're not going to see any huge unexpected costs resulting from the fall of this bill. With that, I want to say that I'll be voting in favour of this piece of legislation. Thank you.