Thank you, Madam Chair. I hear from my honourable Members that you go through the Chair, so I'll say it again, Mr. Roland...
---Laughter
Excuse me. Sorry about that. I have a question for the Minister, Madam Chair. Like my honourable colleague from Nahendeh, I am also new at this process here and
sometimes it seems like it's my first day in school here in front of the principal. However, I am going to continue on with the process and just take the words from the Minister of Indian Affairs that I'm in a learning experience, a learning process. So I'm going to take his advice and his words from this morning.
I want to ask a question regarding the budget address that you made yesterday with regard to preparing our communities to face the realities of the fiscal obligations of the Northwest Territories that we have, the responsibility. We are preparing ourselves in the House here when we go through the exercise of deciding a strategy for the department to prepare our people in the small communities; the down-to-earth, day-to-day people who pay taxes, go to work, who come to talk to us as the Members of the Legislative Assembly, in terms of educating and helping them to also deal with this reality. They will get mad at us. Why are you increasing our payroll? Why are you increasing the corporate taxes? How come the Northwest Territories is so rich in its resources, yet Ottawa is taking a whole bunch of it?
So in plain English, in plain language, how do we educate and help our people get on our side and say that there's a bigger picture here and how do we work all together? That's going to be our responsibility, I guess, in terms of helping our people in the smaller communities understand the process that we have been undertaking yesterday and today. Thank you, Madam Chair.