Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To set a course for the future, whether it's a short or a medium or a long-term one, it really helps me to get a sense of where we could be if I'm able to see the future and then know that I'll be able to take action on the future. This is the opportunity that I think we've been given here. It's a huge opportunity for ourselves and for our sister territories to really be able to envision and shape and set our sights on who we want to be, where we want to go, how we want to work and understand each other, and how we're going to set our relationships up with the rest of Canada and the rest of the world. So it really is a great opportunity. Probably a better than once-in-a-lifetime chance for a part of Canada to say here is where we want to go and to have the attention of the senior level of government and I think, along with that, of our partners in the other provinces.
So I embrace this but, at the same time, I don't want to oversell it either, to myself or anybody else. This isn't as if we're getting a blank cheque and we can write it ourselves. In outlining these objectives and these visions and the dreams along with that, we've got to realize that we'll have to take responsibility and accountability for what we do in order to get there. Not attaining the kind of things we might want to do is going to be as much our fault or our problem as anybody else's. Really this is an exercise for us to leave the nest, if you will, leave the den, go out into the real world, if you will. In so many ways for the time that we've been the Northwest Territories, we have not been living the same style or have the same kind of conditions or opportunities placed on us that the rest of Canada does. We really have a lot of artificiality here. I would really like to get away and get out from underneath it and this is a chance to say to ourselves and the rest of Canada, here's how we'd like to do it.
Mr. Chairman, seeing the future and being the future is my way of positioning this. What I'd like to do for the next few minutes is give you some snapshots of where I would like to be if I was writing a report on the Northwest Territories 10 years from now.
So here's a report from the year 2015. The Northwest Territories today is a part of Canada that is free of the Northern Affairs Program...