Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am pleased to speak to something that has been on people's minds in my riding for many, many years, and I think it's time I have an opportunity to speak to it.

In terms of our value system, there seems to be a conflict between what we call a land-based economy versus a commerce-based economy. Unfortunately, as we, if I may use the word politely, Mr. Chairman, have been marginalized, we tend to deal with on an ongoing basis of those who are on income support. The difficulty seems to lie in the way we manage the transitional change or the stages which we go through. Unfortunately, the majority of my riding is in that boat.

Once assistance is offered, many times over and over, we need to offer some support to income support clients through a funding mechanism to put people back on the land where they will come resourceful again. I asked the Minister of RWED the other day if he would consider working with your ministry to see if you can reform some of your policies so people can become self-reliant again. It goes beyond the promoting of self-reliance. It also entails a number of interesting concepts and those are concepts such as the healing process, heading back where living off the land becomes job worthiness rather than one where you have to earn an income to support yourself. Once you learn the skills on the land, there are many different aspects to it. Certainly it's a learning institution in itself. There are survival skills and I look at hopefully with the reform in RWED to support educational transition and how we use animals for commercial purposes, the collection of qiviuk, for example, and trying to overcome some of the political problems we do have at the community level to advocate the need for some kind of an economic reform.

So, Mr. Minister, I want to take this opportunity to talk a bit about how those productive choices can be managed through a different effort, an effort which requires the combination of on-the-land skill development as well as incorporating certain educational tools. I want to just say in my 14 years of teaching in the wilderness area, we made a lot of scientists out of young trappers. They understand the geology, the geography, the biomass, the plants, the different seasonal uses. They also became good mathematicians because they could understand the value of distance, trigonometry. Although I am not an expert in mathematics, I certainly understand when they try to factor in the different degrees of grades of a hill. So it does have an educational factor.

Just in conclusion, I would like to ask the department to consider if they would work with another department and see if we can put people back on the land developing certain teaching modules and perhaps that can be considered as part of their educational process. That is something we need to look at as an alternative other than keeping people on income support and paying huge community costs to maintain them. Thank you.