Mr. Chairman, I have just a couple of points. First of all, we worked hard for a lot of months in order to get the $500 million for the North. It is true that the money is only for those communities along the Mackenzie Valley because those are the communities that are impacted. In the same way, the diamond socio-economic agreements were basically for the communities and the people in the impacted area. You didn't see a lot of money going into other communities. There will, no doubt, be some spin-off though from this into all the Territories because this $500 million is meant for socio-economic impact. That is everything from treatment centres to education programs to enhanced infrastructure and so on. That all saves us money because it means that we are not going to be taking it out of our little capital budget and have to spend it there, so all of us benefit from this money.
Although the pipeline is an uncertainty, it certainly does seem to be going in the right direction. I don't know which street Mr. Hawkins is listening to people on, but the signals I get are the other way. In the last couple of weeks, there has been some good progress made, and that seems to be continuing.
Mr. Chairman, we would look really foolish, in my view, to first argue for $500 million and then, for the sake of $136,000 have no input at all into how that money is going to be allocated. We are involved right now with Ottawa and with the regional aboriginal organizations on the coordination of how that money is going to flow into the regions. When this money begins to flow -- and I'm not sure exactly when the first payment will be made -- when that happens, then we have a seat at the regional tables to be able to have input into how that money is going to be allocated. We could have no capacity and just sit back here and let somebody else decide on the $500 million. I don't think that is good governance, good economics, good management of money or anything else. We can always say we can do this from within, but it gets tougher and tougher with the amount of things we have on the agenda in the Executive right now to just keep swallowing up more and more responsibilities. I am not convinced that, without additional resources, we are going to be able to manage this well. It is a lot of money to manage.
Mr. Chairman, let me also say that if, for some reason, Imperial were to announce next month that they just were not going to go ahead with the pipeline, they are going to put it on the shelf, we would not be proceeding with this at all, then $500 million wouldn't flow and we would definitely not be looking to go forward with any more of this money. It would stop when that happens. So we are not going to be giving these positions for something that doesn't exist. But as long as that $500 million is going out, I think, as a government, we should be in there helping to manage it.