Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I do recognize that we are going into a review of the Income Support Program in the North here and that we give some serious consideration in terms of this benefit to the families. I'll wait until we come to completion of that when it runs through the documents, I suppose, in terms of the meetings, and the presentations, and what we come out with. I'm going to save my comments for that committee when we have time to have some discussion.

The other one I want to talk about is the clawback on the IBA benefits. I know there's some legal opinions on it on both sides of this House here in terms of that clawback and in terms of income support, and the IBAs are considered a transaction and a business deal and that, in this day and age, it's considered by this government as income, more of a business. It just scares me in terms of interpretation of how this IBA came out, and depending what side of the bed you wake up in terms of how you're looking at it. However, for us in the region, it's deemed as

a treaty right, or treaty obligation, under our treaties under our land claims. So I want to say that until we hear differently right now, because of the benefits of working on our land, that the land was given up in terms of having rights, go on there and work on it. There's different various legal opinions on this. So to have a benefit be clawed back, in terms of what the government sees, is something totally foreign to us. So I just want to state I know I'm going to get opposition from the other side, which is okay, but the people in our region say that the IBA benefits are a treaty obligation that flow out of our treaty that flowed out of our land claim, and our land claim is a modern day treaty. So the only way we had these types of avenues open up to us is because of our land claim or because of the treaties. That's the evolution of these IBA agreements, otherwise oil companies won't do anything if we had no treaties or no land claim. You know, they wouldn't have any legal obligation. Also, that's where it came up from, and I said there's various legal opinions out there and, you know, they put a lot of weight on them by both governments, aboriginal governments and the territorial government, in terms of how they see these IBA payments. I'm going to say it again to the history of our people, if we didn't have the treaty or the modern day land claim, also known as a treaty, these impact benefit agreements I don't think they'll be coming out. So those arrived from these types of negotiations, but that argument can go on for another day. I am just letting the Minister know that the feelings from my region and feelings from my people that because of these impact agreements and having the right to work on the land, there are benefits to it. You pay out on the one hand and the government is concerned that it's income. So they make adjustments to their funding in terms of services and programs to people who deserve it. I am not going to speak on it too much because we will have some more time in terms of having that type of discussion. I just want to state that, for the record, Mr. Chair. There are some serious concerns about how the income program is looked at. I am happy the Minister is doing some changes to the framework policy and to the way the programs are run. I am going to just leave it at that. I don't require any response from the Minister, if he chooses not to do so. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.