Mr. Speaker, I think the first essential piece we need is for all northern leaders to work together on this and recognize this as being the most important topic we can deal with. Mr. Speaker, there is a meeting of the Aboriginal Summit leaders on November 9th and that is a critical meeting. Following that I intend to, I hope the leaders are able to come to agreement on what their agenda is, who the membership is, and so on. Then I intend to meet with them and I've made that known to the leaders already.
Second, Mr. Speaker, with aboriginal leaders it's not all the aboriginal leaders who see devolution and resource revenue sharing as the top of the agenda. Some of them see settlement of their negotiation processes as being an essential ingredient that they have to resolve first. Mr. Speaker, we have to find a way of being able to work with all leaders, including those who don't see this issue as being the top of their agenda. They've got other things that are more important to them and I respect their wishes.
Mr. Speaker, with regard to the federal government, it's true, as someone mentioned, there's only 43,000 of us. We only have one seat in the federal Parliament, so we
have limited authority. The federal government has all the authority on permits and land use and so on, except for bits of Commissioner's land. So we don't have that legal lever. Mr. Speaker, what we do has to be persuasion, it has to be in some cases assuming some space that is unoccupied. By this I mean taking things like on the financial side. We have to look, and the Minister of Finance has to look, very carefully at what areas could we occupy on taxation, for example. I don't know what those are, but we need to look at what things can we do that are going to cause the federal government to pay attention to our needs.
The other one, Mr. Speaker, is we face a huge bureaucracy in Ottawa and I have to say quite frankly that in my view a lot of the bureaucrats working in Ottawa feel threatened by devolution and resource revenue sharing. Somehow this is going to challenge their right to a job. In that way they continue this colonial legacy that's been going on for so many years. We have to get through to that bureaucracy.
So, Mr. Speaker, as I speak I know the Secretary to Cabinet is writing to Mr. Sulzenko who is the lead for Mr. Prentice on the pipeline file. He is also writing to Harvie Andre who is the lead on devolution file; being very clear with them of what our agenda is. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.