Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank the Member for those points and for the question. I would agree that tourism is a vital component of a diversified economy and we think has a lot of potential in the Northwest Territories. We just recently completed a sectoral analysis and I know that committee has seen that document. There are a number of action items in that document and we look forward to working with all Members and with committee to see if we can't realize our full potential in tourism. As the opening comments mention here today, one of the important things that we recognize is there truly is the ability for all communities, small and large, to develop some product around tourism. We can certainly play a supporting role as government in helping to develop that product. Every community, I would say, in the Northwest Territories has immense potential to improve and increase the tourism revenues to their economy.
When we toured Liard some months back with the Member, I heard a number of the points that he had been continually raising with me at some community and public meetings and that was certainly a good opportunity for me to get the sense that these were issues that were shared by the community and, in fact, he was responding to community needs in our discussions.
I would agree Liard is certainly a very beautiful community that has a lot of potential, but issues such as tourism signage came up. I want to assure the Member that after those meetings I spoke with our deputy minister who approached the Department of Transportation and they sat down and agreed to put a project in place -- and there is a project underway now -- and I understand that there will be a new border sign on the Liard Highway ready, prior to road season. I think the money probably flows through DOT, but we have been involved in advocating that that needed to happen.
I think the Member makes a very good point. It is difficult to expect that we are going to generate tourism traffic, if we don't have adequate signage. We heard the Member and the community on that issue and are moving forward.
Also, I would like to say that we continue to support and work with and on the Deh Cho connection initiative. We think that that is something very important for that region and we look forward in future to advocating regional approaches to tourism and working with communities, to better understand the kinds of things that they have to offer and how we can help people take advantage of their potential.
In terms of main estimates, this year to last year, if I look at the 2005-2006 mains there are about $5.7 million; 2004-2005 Main Estimates were about $5.578 million. Admittedly, we haven't increased tourism spending as much as we would like to, but we have undertaken a joint study with the NWT Association of Tourism, who has a new name -- the new name escapes me at this point -- to look at how we spend our tourism dollars to better understand the roles and department, vis-...-vis the industry organization in terms of research, product
development, destination marketing. I expect that we will have the conclusions of that study in a month or so.
It has taken a little longer than we thought. I think it's because we had two organizations involved jointly driving this project, so we had to do a lot of collaborative work. I think what we will see in the end is a much better product because we did collaborate quite closely with the industry association. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. If I've missed anything, the Member can draw my attention to it.