Thank you, Madam Chair. The issue of recommendations by the Electoral Boundaries Commission brought me back to if we had two extra seats added to the Assembly it was going to be a dominoes affect down the Mackenzie Valley. I strongly support the status quo of 19 Members. The amount of money that's going to be taken out of certain programs within this government is going to have an affect on our programs in the smaller communities. Adding more seats to the House will add more costs. It has an effect on the Cabinet and on the Assembly as a whole.

Madam Chair, the people in the Northwest Territories, especially over the last couple of weeks, think adding a couple more Members to the House would be somewhat questionable. The funding that's going to be required to increase the size of this House is astronomical, especially in light of the programs. The requests that we're asking Cabinet to provide for our communities is going to very, very short listed and limited. I cannot support that and I will not support that. We need to rethink this and think this for the next Assembly maybe.

Madam Chair, I like providing equal representation of some of the boundaries in some of the larger centres. I spoke to the Electoral Boundaries Commission. When you look at my region, you're looking at about a little over 280,000 square kilometres of territory that I cover. For me to fly into each of those communities, meet with each of the leaders -- and there's about three to six or seven leaders that I meet with on different issues -- the Metis, the band, the land corps, education, the chiefs, the mayors and other regional groups, and that's for almost for each community in my region. Usually it takes about $8,000 to do a two-day tour in my region.

So when we look at electoral boundaries and we look at the work, I think our communities are somewhat left out in terms of how we represent our people in the smaller communities. We have different jurisdictions every time we meet in a different community, as opposed to meeting in the larger centres like Yellowknife, Hay River and Inuvik or in Fort Smith. The chief maybe, mayor; that's it. But we in the small communities meet with different leaders, different cultures, different dialects. Even in Deline last year I was told that there were 33 different agencies in just the community of Deline. So when we look at equal representation and representing our people, in the small communities I represent we are truly left out. But I think we all do a good job in representing our people and I'd like to stay with the status quo of 19 and not add another budget item and increase our budget to have two more Members come, otherwise I would have to consider adding a Member to the Sahtu and I do not want to do that right now.

So, Madam Chair, I'd like to stay with the 19, re-jig the boundaries. As it said in here, as Mr. Pokiak has said, it makes good, common sense for this legislation to stay where we are and we thankful for the Electoral Boundaries Commission for the hard work they have done. We listen to people and the Sahtu region will not support two additional Members for the House. Thank you.