Madam Chair, thank you very much. This new portfolio, I call it a new one, has now been about a year under its belt, and I also include the relatively new Business Development Corporation as something that we knew -- it had been in place for some time -- it needed an overhaul. It's been there for about a year now, so its early days yet, Madam Chair, to begin to say whether or not the changes that this Legislature has brought about are achieving the desired objectives from when everything was under one shop with the former Department of RWED.

But I guess I'm getting a sense, Madam Chair, from some contact with various sectors in the business and commercial parts of the NWT, that there is a better capacity and a clearer focus with this new department and this new mandate now, and through Mr. Bell's stewardship to undertake those objectives and move them along. So in that very general respect -- and as I say, it's only been in place for a year now -- I think the moves that we've made have been the right ones, and I look forward to the results and improving our results and hopefully our legacy in setting up, re-jigging and overhauling this particular mandate.

Madam Chair, the tourism aspect of this department's job list has gotten some mention already here this morning. There are a couple things that aren't in this that I would like to reflect on in general comments. Madam Chair, I was able to go down to Hay River, to your community, late last year, and attend the annual conference of the Tourism Industry Association of the NWT. Oh, that's the old name, isn't it? NWT Arctic Tourism. I listened with great interest to how the global tourism market is changing and then looking at where and what we are doing to try to keep pace with these or, even better yet, Madam Chair, try and stay ahead of the curve. But we learned that, of course, change is accelerating around the world. Tourism is the world's biggest single industry. It is the kind of bellwether of all this. I think the sense that I got there was that while the market was changing dramatically, here in the NWT, our product, our marketing and our imaging is not keeping pace with that. We still, Madam Chair, have, it seems, in the national and marketplace, considerable confusion or overlap with our other northern neighbours, particularly Nunavut.

We also learned, Madam Chair, from that conference, that other impacts are going to compel us to adapt. They will be things, Madam Chair, like climate change. We already see this, Madam Chair, in the way some wildlife species are behaving. Polar bears are particularly something that the world is taking notice of, in that their habitat and their habits are changing. So while some tourism markets are set up exclusively on this amazing creature, they are going to have to change what is going on in the NWT with that kind of thing.

Madam Chair, other global situations like terrorism or even pandemics have markedly, in a measured way, affected tourism patterns. We have not escaped that. The population, certainly nationally, is aging. Is our tourism product keeping pace with those changes? And what about emerging markets? In this respect, India and China are the next ones on the horizon.

Madam Chair, something that I've been pursuing since my early days in this job, about six years ago, was more of a tangible initiative on conventions and meetings. A bunch of good work has happened in the last couple of years, but we are still not at the stage where among the stakeholders here in the city and in the tourism industry itself, at the federal and territorial government levels, and even after many years and I think 11 different studies and plans for this kind of thing, we're not there yet.

Madam Chair, the area of the secondary diamond industry and where we're going to go with it has received some attention in this Assembly already this session. In the general, and a strategic and, I guess, a long-term way, Madam Chair, I see that we are not, we really haven't set up a good model or a sustainable model for this. There is still considerable government and taxpayer investment at risk through this. Madam Chair, there are at least two, maybe three other diamond mines in the wings and we are going to see more and more and more production from the Northwest Territories. Can we grow our NWT-based cutting and polishing industry to continue to take advantage of this incredible harvest of our wealth, Madam Chair? That is really what I would like to do, is to see what we can do to set up a sustainable model that will help us grow this as more production is attained.

Madam Chair, finally, something that was absent from the Minister's opening comments -- I know it occupies a very small part of the shelf of this new department -- that is the combined responsibility that this department has with Education, Culture and Employment for the Arts Strategy. This particular initiative has not got off to a good start. It is an unusual situation to have a strategy of any kind shared between two departments, and something that I'm going to be exploring is just where Mr. Bell sees his part of the mandate and what kind of a difference or benefit is being demonstrated from this new strategy and from this department's mandate in it. Thank you, Madam Chair.