Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to speak to the Yellowknife courthouse for just a minute too, since most of the Members have touched on that. I think there is a business case and an argument to be made for the fact that Yellowknife may need a new courthouse and that we've been in leased space and there are issues of security and there are issues of access and interview rooms and accommodating people. I haven't read the report in-depth. I think there's an argument to be made for owing a standalone court services building in Yellowknife, as opposed to leasing something and spending a lot of money modifying it over the years. But the price tag of an anticipated $41 million, I don't know who came up or dreamt up the plan for this building, but just to put in on an order of magnitude with other buildings in Yellowknife that would cost around the same amount of money, I think the Stanton Territorial Hospital probably cost -- mind you, a few years ago, but not that long ago -- maybe in the neighbourhood of $50 million. I think the new Inuvik hospital cost around $50 million, more recently constructed than the Stanton hospital. We know what the North Slave Correctional Centre cost: almost $50 million. But when the Minister says that we're not building a monument and we're going to bring our old furniture over and that's going to save a lot of money, I'm sorry. A $41 million building is an astronomically expensive building. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it right and do it once and make it what we what we want to make, but make no mistake. The building that we're sitting in tonight was about a $26 million building 10 years ago, and there's nothing but the best of everything in this building, and we didn't have to move the furniture from the old facility.

Sometimes I just wished that we could put things in the context of looking at what people do deal with in the smaller communities. Yellowknife is the capital; let's give Yellowknife its due. Half of the population of the Northwest Territories lives here. But you know sometimes I just wished that we could put something like this in the context of you have to go to the communities; you just have to go to the small communities and drive down the streets, and look at the people's houses, and look at their schools that are cracking, and look at the nursing station, and look at the brown patch in Nahanni Butte where the kids play soccer. I mean, sometimes you just have to put this in the context of the range of what we're dealing with here. Just imagine this. You have somebody in a small community, they're living in a homeownership unit, something they've been struggling to maintain on their own, they have a brush with the law, now a big system kicks into place. We've taken away the regional community justice coordinators so we can give them back that little pittance of whatever it is, $267,000, back to the community and say we're doing you a favour. So now this person comes in contact with our justice system. So we'll put them on a jet with an RCMP escort, we'll fly them to Yellowknife, we'll accommodate them in a $50 million jail, and then we'll usher them over to the $40 million courthouse done up sparing no expense. I wish somebody could view this from another planet and just see how this could look. Try to imagine it. We bring them to the big city here, we take them into a building probably like nothing they've ever seen before, with all things shiny and bright and glass and beautiful woodwork, and sit them up in front of a guy with a gavel and say welcome to the justice system. But, you know, I guess at the end of the day they get to off to that nice prison facility and we'll put them in a cage and we'll lock the door, and maybe we'll do a little programming with them and hopefully send them back to their community in better shape.

There's just something about the contradiction of the way we do stuff that makes me sick. When the Minister talks about oh, yes, we killed the five positions for community justice coordinators in the communities. Probably one of very few jobs in some of these communities. But we did that because we're going to give those communities back that money so they can do something about community justice in their communities. But we're going to build a $40 million courthouse in Yellowknife. There's something wrong with this picture, Mr. Chairman.

This is not a utilitarian kind of building we're talking about here, let's be honest. This is elaborate. It is a monument. Sure, we know we're proud in the Northwest Territories and we have nice infrastructure and nice facilities in our capital and why would you want to build anything less. But I don't know; $41 million. I'd like to ask the Minister who came up with that plan that designed that number. Where did that number come from? Is that a Class A estimate? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.