Mr. Speaker, from the sports desk we will go over to the business desk and...
---Laughter
...take a look at the status of our secondary diamond industry in the Northwest Territories.
Mr. Speaker, this government has made some very sound and very good investments and great policy moves in the secondary diamond industry. We have established internationally recognized standards in our training programs for diamonds. We have boldly, and I think correctly, gone into some areas regarding the branding and the certification of diamonds, something again that was new to the world and seems to be well received. We have used the diamond industry to our advantage in cultivating the image of the Northwest Territories in our tourism product and we certainly set a strong line, when we sought a 10 percent allocation from diamond miners of their product to stay behind here in the NWT.
Mr. Speaker, these areas, while they have been a sound and very intelligent support of the industry, we have made some real blunders in the risk side, in the actual frontline involvement in the diamond cutting industry itself. We initially had to come back in and back up a loan guarantee for the Deton'Cho Diamond Corporation in the $1 million neighbourhood. We got involved in a very protracted and expensive Polar Bear trademark issue with the Sirius diamond company and now we face a $3 million and growing tab with the coverage of our loan guarantee at Sirius.
It is folly, Mr. Speaker, for our government to continue to paper over our mistakes with taxpayers' money. We need to realize that things are not going well for us as investors, as frontline players, in the secondary diamond industry. It is indeed important for us to continue to support the secondary diamond industry with initiatives like training and the business environment, but we cannot afford any longer to risk taxpayers' money on high-risk ventures that we do not understand. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
---Applause