Thank you, Mr. Chairman. One of the concerns that's out there is if you look at the numbers of the Bathurst herd specifically, from 1986 there were 470,000 animals and in 2003 there were 186,000. You'd better stand up and pay attention; somehow 300,000 caribou disappeared. But I don't think that's the entire story because we don't have management plans for all the caribou that are there. I think what the management plan does is cause some unnecessary concern out there that the Bathurst caribou herd is in danger, when I don't believe it is. Until you count all the caribou and you have a management plan in place for all the caribou that have the habitat of the central mainland, you have no idea what...How are you ever going to dream up restrictions or bring in restrictions or even think about having restrictions until you count every single caribou from the Hudson Bay to the Mackenzie River? It's impossible. That's what I'm trying to get at and I don't know if the Minister agrees with me on this or not, but it's important to the livelihood of a number of people who live in the Northwest Territories and it's an important issue and one that I think the department has to pay close attention to.
The sooner we have a management plan for all the caribou, the better off we'll be and the more at ease people will be. Because I do believe that if you count up all the caribou, there are more caribou today, from the folks I've talked to, than there were 30 or 40 years ago. That's got to be substantiated somehow. Instead we have a management plan that looks like we've lost 300,000 caribou. Like I mentioned yesterday, any caribou taken from Yellowknife north to the Arctic Coast are deemed to be a Bathurst caribou, when in fact it might be one of three or four different herds. It's just not 100 percent accurate until you know all the figures. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.