Mr. Speaker, thank you very much for this opportunity to speak on the motion and I believe it's doable and I believe it's time.

---Applause

As the honourable Member for Great Slave had indicated yesterday, an act governing the NWT was created in 1870 in Ottawa, and I believe that the territorial aspirations for wanting their own revenues and their share of royalties began one day after that act was created. So that's 134 years ago, Mr. Speaker, yet we're still on the same path and Ottawa certainly still has the old colonial mentality when it comes to our treatment for ourselves here in the Northwest Territories.

Just specific to the motion, Mr. Speaker, I'm a strong believer that, yes, we should maximize our benefit from this pipeline. I was a young man once...

---Laughter

...and it was about 1983, I had just finished school and they were talking about that first oil pipeline back then. I was quite opposed to it because I knew that that's the land I grew up on and used, and what kind of benefits are we going to get from it. So I fought along with everybody else in saying look, you are not ramming this thing down our land without giving us some significant long-term benefits. So we stood there and we battled and we battled and we lost that battle, Mr. Speaker, based on national interest.

But there's one important lesson that I would like to learn from that, and that's that we spent all our energy opposing the pipeline at that time and we forgot about taking care of our people and boosting our infrastructure. I just want to make people aware that this time we're not going to do that. We've got to take a better approach, and our government is going to have to help us do it this time. I asked the Minister of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development earlier in the House today, Mr. Speaker, about what our socioeconomic plan is, if we are going to be interveners, what role are we going to play instead of just rolling over, and I still contend that. This is just one step of doing it, we say here, okay, we do have interest in our land and we do want to take care of it. In fact, the riding that I represent is called Nahendeh. I mentioned to a couple people it means our land and, in fact, technically it does, but technically it doesn't, Mr. Speaker. What it really means is that the land is with us. Nahendeh -- the land is with us, and I kind of referred to that in my Member's statement is that from the land, our historical economic base was trapping and we're using furs, the furs were providing for our needs, and now it's different. Now here's an opportunity for the land to still be with us by allowing us wealth, by accessing the gas and oil and other renewable resources that exist in our territory, Mr. Speaker, that we have to sell to Ottawa that they have to recognize that it's time to give us some control over those resources and that's all we're asking.

This motion is giving us an avenue to say okay, devolution is not going to be a reality in the next couple of years, but here's an opportunity in the absence of devolution let's take this pipeline, let's consider some kind of interim resource revenue sharing deal for that pipeline alone. Of course, I like their approach that all northern governments are going to have to partake because, particularly in my riding, I've got the Deh Cho First Nations who have the same aspirations and have maintained it since time immemorial that we want control of our resources, and I'm sure that jointly with the support of the government this can be achievable with the Deh Cho First Nations as well, Mr. Speaker.

In fact, there's one thing I wish to speak to with regard to pipelines is that even the first oil pipeline was built in 1985 and they had a free ride for 20 years. They had a free ride for 20 years and no one said okay, let's look at this and start garnishing some resource revenues from that pipeline as well. So I'd like to put it to the government in this motion, let's look at that as well, let's start today...