Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, the way the act reads it says its purpose is to ensure that male and female persons in the public service continue to be protected against systematic wage discrimination through the recommendation and exercise of the right to equal pay for work of equal value, and that whereas the provision of the right to equal pay for work of equal value in the public service, and further sets out the leadership role of the Government of the Northwest Territories on employment equity issues among employees of the Northwest Territories. My question is in regard to the last statement where it says among employees of the Northwest Territories. Through a contractual arrangement with communities, public funds are being expended to provide a public service, and we are paying a person less to provide a public service. For me, that is totally the opposite of what this statement says. I feel that the government has a contractual arrangement with communities to provide services such as mental health services, economic development officers' positions in communities, income support positions, they also have positions in municipal services that we have under contract. So through these contractual arrangements with this government, those contracts violate not only this legislation, but the human rights legislation that we passed. Right now the contractual arrangement that this government has gotten themselves into undermines the fair equity practice of ensuring that we have no discrimination in wages. But this government knows that positions in the communities, such as a mental health officer for instance, have been paid somewhere in the range of $50,000 for the last five years. They haven't seen an increase. That's the total amount to run that position. Yet when a similar position is taken on by a government employee, the government pays that position in the range of $75,000 to $80,000. Government employees have seen increases based on the fact that they're part of a union.

Right now the communities are giving back contractual agreements and not signing them on the basis that it's inequitable. So I'd just like to ask the Minister, in light of the Human Rights Act and this legislation, does that mean that the contractual arrangements we have with communities to provide public services are going to be considered discriminatory based on the question of providing public services and also ensuring that equal pay for work of equal value is taken into account when we have these contractual agreements to provide public services?