Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To the appropriation here regarding our loss on the diamond turnover here, I guess it really illustrates that this is a new enterprise in Canada and a risky one. There was a quick, steep learning curve. Perhaps is has plateaued a little bit now, but as we can see with these numbers here, Mr. Chairman, our government is still learning and obviously

learning the hard way, the very hard way, about going into these kind of ventures.

As an MLA here in the city and in the territory, Mr. Chairman, I am a supporter of governments going into areas where private enterprise does not have the wherewithal or the infrastructure or the ability to take a risk when the certainty of its outcome is not all that great. If government can go in on these kinds of new groundbreaking ventures, such as setting up secondary diamond shops, and help absorb the risk with the private sector, then I think that is a worthwhile endeavour and in principle I support it.

Now that we have taken our lumps on this particular one -- this isn't the only one that the taxpayer has had to absorb some impact on -- hopefully just about all of it here, I did want to explore a couple of aspects of the way this Sirius failure has come about and how it has been managed. The Minister has provided, upon questioning from Mr. Hawkins, some information to the effect that on a $10.7 million total exposure we will potentially see, and this is after perhaps a decade of recovery on the trademark fee, a net loss of $4 million on a total exposure of $10.7 million. Maybe my terminology is a little bit off there, but we lost about 40 percent of our shirt on this one, Mr. Chair.

One of the things that I recall about the way we managed this, when the original company and the loan was called and the government actually stepped in and took over the plant, was how long it took us to determine how we were going to go about looking for a potential new buyer, and then how long it took us to verify and make up our minds and go through the paperwork and even when it came clear that a certain party was not going to be the successful bidder, it took weeks it seemed -- and I think I'm right on that, Mr. Chairman -- just to sort of clear the paperwork up so we could get on with actually finding a new buyer.

My point, Mr. Chairman, is that I really wasn't impressed with the way we handled this in an expedient nature. It seemed to take us a long, long time to get through what would otherwise have been or should have been relatively straightforward, not easy, but a relatively straightforward business decision on how to move something through.

I guess there is an area there that I wanted to probe a bit, Mr. Chairman. How is it that it took us so long to kind of work our way out of this receivership and into a position where the new Sirius company lives on under the Arslanian banner? Why did it take us so long to get here? Thank you.