Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As a Member of this committee, I just wanted to make a couple of comments or highlights of things that really stood out for me as being a part of this work of this committee. It was especially interesting when it was formed back in the early days of this assembly because as a politician and somebody who has grown up in the North and watched our political systems evolve and change, I was very interested and supportive of the kinds of things that are going on in the Legislative Assembly, among self-government and First Nations and among municipalities in the NWT. So I was very personally interested in the topic that this addressed, which was how we are going to manage ourselves, if you will, as these various new structures are recognized and come into being. It was something that I supported very strongly as the mandate of this committee was being developed, that our job is not to come in and define what the answers should be or how many people should be involved or how many desks or how many telephones we are going to need to implement self-government. That is really not the purpose of this exercise and one that we dispensed with very early.

Rather, it was to help us to prepare ourselves to manage the changes that we know are going to come through the realization of self-government and, Mr. Chairman, the evolution of this institution, the Legislative Assembly and the Government of the Northwest Territories.

With the work of our staff and our researchers and the consultation that we did have, Mr. Chairman, I picked up a very useful perspective on self-government as it comes about in the NWT and that is we should be looking at these agreements and these negotiations and the deals that come out of it as it all comes down to some kind of piece of paper at some point, is beginnings. These are not final agreements, as we so often refer to in the course of our business. Rather they are the beginnings of new things and new ways of doing things and new opportunities.

The report also develops what we have called the five "Cs" or the words community, concurrency, consultation, coordination and cooperation as guidelines, if you will, or words that we should all be using as we think about how these new arrangements are going to become reality and how they are going to start to make a difference in people's lives.

I won't go into the details of those five "Cs," they are well outlined in the report, but page 20 helps illustrate why we are going to need to be more attentive to these ideas of community, concurrency and consultation.

This table on page 20, Mr. Chairman, outlines about 24 different powers, if you will, that our assembly has under the NWT Act and it contrasts that with some 42 different powers that are contained so far in the framework of this example of the Deh Cho First Nations. So I think it's a really good illustration that we are setting up these concurrencies, these potential conflicts and we also have to be mindful of the coordination and cooperation that I think everyone is going to need to make efforts to apply. That's at the federal, the territorial, the aboriginal and at the municipal level, Mr. Chairman.

When we first started looking at this and, with the assistance of ministries like Aboriginal Affairs, started to get a handle on just how complex and how diverse the arrangements are going to be among the different self-government agreements, it really looked like it was something that was unachievable. How are we going to work our way through this? There are so many different parameters. As we learned more about it and started to poke and probe and examine this from different directions, different angles and different points of view, I learned, Mr. Chairman, that this is something that we should not be daunted or intimidated by. As unusual and unique as it is in Canada, perhaps in the Commonwealth, what we have in this report are some tangible ways and approaches of moving to the next stages of doing our part as a Legislative assembly and a Government of a Northwest Territories. After all, we are party to these negotiations and these agreements. We have made commitments that we will need to live up to. This report gives us some tangible ways of how to approach those challenges and how to help make the dreams of the First Nations and a like a lot of people here in the NWT, how to help them become a reality in the years and the decades to come.

So I commend the recommendations of the report to the assembly as we will be getting into shortly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.