I thank the Member for those comments and I'll try to be as succinct as possible, however, it's a very broad question with maybe no very obvious and immediate answers in all areas. But let me start by saying that the Member is right that in terms of this project we do have conditions as a government and as a territory, and that is that adequate benefits will accrue to northerners and we start with that premise, we start with that as our highest principle. Then our role becomes very evident I think, but it flows from that. Clearly we have a responsibility for a number of mandates by departments. We have responsibility for the environment. We have responsibility to support the business efforts and aspirations of our people. We have a responsibility to mitigate potential negative social impacts and I think that the Member is very much aware of those issues as chair of that committee.
We also have a responsibility I believe to maximize all opportunities potentially available for northerners in a wide range of areas, and this involves employment, this involves training and I think it's important that we recognize that it will be a skilled workforce, by and large, that's able to take advantage of these opportunities. We do, as a government, have a mandate for training and need to work with our people to ensure that they are able to take advantage of these opportunities and those opportunities don't pass our people by.
Clearly we also have obligations that we have to meet for the environmental review and regulatory process that's now underway. We have mandates in areas like environmental protection. We have areas of responsibility in areas like wildlife and forestry. So we have a mandate. We will be intervening on behalf of people in the Northwest Territories and we will certainly make sure that
we advocate those areas of responsibility and we take that role very seriously.
I'd also like to say that our government's role involves supporting our aboriginal organizations across the territory in order to achieve their objectives in terms of this project, and I think of our funding and contribution, our ongoing support for the Aboriginal Pipeline Group. Really I think that their work in this model will be a successful model going forward. I think it speaks to a new level of aboriginal involvement in some of these mega projects. I think truly if you're going to benefit from development, you have to be involved at the ownership level and that's in fact what we have here and I think that's why so many people are optimistic about the future of this project.
We will also be completing the socioeconomic agreement. I think we've had quite a broad discussion around those issues that fall under the socioeconomic agreement, but maybe something that we didn't touch on was our desire to ensure that legacy infrastructure flows from that socioeconomic agreement and that is one of the areas that we will highlight.
I take the Member's point about communications to our constituencies. That is our government's role. I like the committee recommendation that in fact ITI develop a communications strategy to advise the public on how our government is organized and what our government's response constitutes. We are in the process of doing that due, in large part, to the direction and work and support of committee and that's underway and we look forward to coming back to committee with some discussion around that communications strategy in future. Thank you.