Madam Chair, I think we have had some very significant new ground broken. I'll explain it to you. Under our Constitution we have an equalization program with the provinces. Section 36 of the Constitution says that Parliament and the Government of Canada are committed to the principle of making equalization payments to ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of public service at reasonably comparable levels of taxation. That has always existed for the provinces. It has not existed for the territories. We used to have one where we'd have to go to Ottawa and defend our spending line by line and negotiate each thing. Then we got onto a formula that was different. What the Prime Minister has done is he has said from here on I want to treat the territories the same way I treat provinces. That's a big step to me because we're now in a different league. We're not just little territories, part of DIAND, in the Prime Minister's mind and how he'll deal with us. This is a step in our evolution and I think a very important step, as we'll find in the years to come.

In doing that, then that piece of the Constitution is also going to apply to us, in my view. Because if he's going to treat us like the provinces, then as the provinces equalization program builds -- and it will, over 10 years it's going to go up by almost $29 billion -- then so is our money going to go up. In fact, we now have the same rights in many ways as do the provinces under the Constitution. I think that's pretty important that we've achieved that rather than just be funded at the whim of the Department of Finance in Ottawa. That one is significant. It's hard to measure that in dollars, but I think it's significant to be treated as grown-ups.

The second major breakthrough, Madam Chair, is that having a floor amount, a floor...What's the term he uses for it? It's a minimum funding floor of 1.9 and 2.0 and so on as we move ahead. It says that those days when we had to worry about clawbacks and not know how our own-source revenue was going to be treated and all that stuff, that's all passed now. From now on it's going to make Mr. Roland's job a lot easier. I shouldn't say it's going to be easy, but it will be easier in that he knows how much money we can expect from the grant. In our case I believe it is around 70 percent. But that's a known quantity that we'll know from year to year what we're going to receive. We don't have to worry about, whoops, somebody made

an unexpected readjustment back for prior years and we just lost $40 million or something like that. That's gone. That, to me, is significant.

The third piece is when he put a floor in place, then that is going to give a lot more flexibility for us in terms of our own-source funding. If we raise taxes, if we raise revenue in some way ourselves -- whether it's cigarettes or gasoline or whatever it may be, or liquor -- then that is not going to be adjusted back below that floor. We're guaranteed a minimum amount of money; that's the 1.9 and 2.0. To me, that is also significant. Our own-source revenues now become a much more important part of our budget. I certainly like that better than having to depend on the federal government for a grant. Any steps we can take toward becoming more self-sufficient I'm in favour of.

There are some questions that are outstanding yet and Mr. Roland and his people will certainly be looking into those and making sure we've covered all the bases as we move along. Not everything is 100 percent clear yet.

There are some pieces that I don't like as much, and I think Mr. Roland shares my view on it. One of them would be the 3.5 percent escalator. I'm hoping that when the panel does its work that it can, even though it's not within their mandate, hopefully take a look at the impact of that because I know our growth is more than 3.5 percent. If we were stuck on 3.5 percent year after year after year for a long period of time that could end up eroding any of the gains that we made. When you get a package, sometimes it doesn't come as 100 percent wins. We have to deal with it incrementally. So my sense is that this package is setting us on a path that is going to give us more benefits and more flexibility than we ever had before with the old formula.

I have to say that I agree with the Prime Minister in his approach. I do want to have more discussions with him to clarify what he means when he says treat us like a province. I have lots of questions about that.

In terms of how we spend the money, allocate it and so on, again, I'll leave that with our Finance Minister. We have money during this fiscal year. It's late in the year and I don't think any of us as MLAs really want to see us go on a shopping spree with this. We've got to work our way through and we can always carry money forward. Thank you.