Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is something we've been in discussion with committee about. Governance and Economic Development committee was floated the idea first, initially, and they were at least intrigued enough with the idea to suggest that we needed to get out and talk to businesses and get their sense. The premise, Mr. Speaker, really is that the BIP, which was created a number of years ago, we think is not as useful as it once was, not as effective as it once was. It really speaks only to GNWT procurement. I think the last numbers we had, on $200 million worth of procurement, there were premiums paid to BIP registered businesses somewhere in the neighbourhood of $200,000. If you remember back to the initial impetus for this, it was about levelling the playing field for northern business as compared to southern. What I think happens, for the most part now that our market is a little more mature, is that you have BIP businesses bidding against BIP businesses and it ends up being a wash. So we felt that the administrative burden on our department, but spread right across all departments and on small business and larger business to comply and register, to have us monitor the BIP, was onerous compared to the value. So we've started this discussion. I've met with the NWT Chamber. They are putting out a survey to their membership over the next month, and we will have ongoing discussions around this.

But I want to clarify that it's not a small decrease to the small business tax rates. It's, in fact, a 50 percent reduction in small business tax rates, from four percent to two percent, that we're proposing would fill the gap. So we would, instead of having the BIP program, we would take the money and use that to provide a 50 percent tax break for small business. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.