Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just wanted to make some closing comments on this discussion we had this afternoon. I want to say, first of all, that I really do listen carefully and will read Hansard very carefully on the good comments that were made today. I think that was a good discussion, the kind of discussion that I hope we can have more often because there are many things going on in this territory and in the North that we have no control over, whether it is by big multinationals or whether it is by other governments or whatever there may be. We are not in control of it. I don't feel that we have to control everything, but we have to be part of everything. We have to understand what is going on. It makes me very uneasy if we are just drifting along with the development. It used to be that development just happened incrementally. You found another patch of good land, farmers moved there and then they moved further north and further west. In our territory, it was we would find another mine or another pool of gas and you would have development that way. I believe we have an opportunity to manage that.

There are a few people who talked about some good practical suggestions that stood out, like the trust fund. Many of you mentioned the cost of living, a common thread we have here as northerners.

When we first began to look at the strategy, I thought we did, as a Legislative Assembly, work on our own NWT strategy as our guidance for the life of our government. I believe that's a good document. When we started to look at the North, and I had discussions with the Prime Minister going back over a year ago, we realized that the North is not just the Northwest Territories, just Yukon or Nunavut or just a combination of those three. There are many issues that affect all of us, so it was necessary to look at some things that were pan-territorial and say we can't talk about a climate change strategy or an energy strategy or sovereignty or security as just being Northwest Territories. We need to look at some of those things pan-territorial, but there are some things that are specific to our territory.

I see this document we will develop this spring as a first cut of a strategy as being one that will have a chapter or chapters on pan-territorial issues, but there will, very clearly, be a chapter on the Northwest Territories. As Members have said, we are quite different than Nunavut or Yukon. So there would be a chapter on the Northwest Territories, a chapter on Nunavut and a chapter on the Yukon.

Why include the other territories into the strategy? Well, it is because of the pan-territorial vision we need to have, a northern or arctic vision. Also because as one territory talking about its own issues, we may feel it's really big but when we look at all the priorities the federal government has, we are just a small piece of the whole agenda. So how do we make our issues into a major force in Ottawa? That is to talk about the North as a northern unit, because that's how the Prime Minister sees it. I am very happy with the extent to which the Prime Minister has bought into this and the extent to which he understands the pan-territorial issue, but he also understands the individual territories are very, very different and that one size doesn't fit all. We are going to have to do things different for us than the way you do it in the Yukon or Nunavut.

The other one is we look forward. We are very lucky because today it's us. We are riding the top of the wave in terms of economic development and lots of exciting things on the political front. Tomorrow it might be the Yukon, it could be Nunavut. So we will go through these things, but I think we have to work together with our northern partners on it.

Not only do we work with northerners, we also work with the Council of the Federation, that's with all the Premiers across the country. A few years ago, we moved from the kids' table to the big table. Other Premiers don't talk about the Premier of the Northwest Territories or Yukon as government leaders anymore. They talk about us as Premiers. We get exactly the same rights at the table as they do. They support us on our issues. We support them on their issues. I think by working together, that common thread we talked about goes further than just in the Northwest Territories. It's a common threat right across

the North. I believe we have more clout nationally and globally if we talk about the North as a place that we all live and we can all work together at.