Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to offer some comments on the Department of Finance, as well as I guess the budget address too on the issue, and I'd like to speak about the new positions being put into Finance. I've mentioned those positions on a number of other occasions and I happen to think that this is not such a bad idea. I don't know exactly what relationships this section will have with the work that the ITI is doing, but I'm of the opinion that any government should have an economic think tank. We should be aware of what's going on in the macroeconomic picture, and certainly in our jurisdiction there's a lot going on and it's funny because we have a dichotomy of constantly arguing with the federal government about what share we are not getting and the fact that we don't have a resource revenue sharing agreement and devolution negotiation and such, but at the same time we, in some corners of our territory, seem to be awash in cash, or at least it seems like that, or maybe because we didn't have this kind of situation before where we have $500 million of SIFF money, even though it's not coming to the GNWT, but it is money that's going into communities where communities are needing to talk about what to do with this and with all of the cross-jurisdiction. I'm sure the communities want to maximize the opportunities with this money, but not fund things that are the jurisdiction of the GNWT or Canada. That in itself could be a challenge because we are so intermeshed and then we've had community transfer money, I mean community transfer from MACA, the gas tax money and the infrastructure money. I mean, it's hard for us to keep track of all the impacts on that just in numbers.

But in our visits to communities during pre-budget session, elders have come to me and said, you know, we have to get ready for what's going to happen to our community with the residential money. I mean, sometimes we need to deal with the impacts of money coming in and we have a different economy in the North that government plays still such an important role in terms of how the money is infused into our economy. I think Yellowknife and some of the major centres have a market economy and there's a lot of private investment happening, but in many communities, government and

public money is still the major purse string and it is a good thing to understand how all these relate to each other. Now, how do we maximize the benefits out of that end? I don't know exactly. Maybe the Minister will have a chance to speak further when we get to the specific sections about exactly what the Minister has in mind in terms of what he thinks this section could do, and what the new economists in this section are going to be studying. I'm going to have some assignments for them, as well. So in that respect, I do support that.

The second thing that I want to briefly mention is I think some of the things that this section should do and that I've been told that when I ask questions about it when we were reviewing ITI or Housing, even that the Finance department has taken over analyzing impact of Novel, or, sorry, I wasn't supposed to mention that name, ABCD Company, a new housing concept, and I want to speak that just in terms as an economic project. Five hundred million dollars under socio-economic impact money is a huge infusion of money. That's $500 million. That's half of our budget. It may not be enough, but it is a big, big chunk of money.

Residential students' healing money, if that does come through with this new government, that could be in the hundreds of millions and that is an infusion of money into our economy. Expenditure of $500 million for the new housing concept, or even all the money that's going to come in with the pipeline, seven to nine billion dollars, all the labour force that's going to come. I do believe there's got to be an engine in there, in government somewhere, to study what the impact of that might be and how do you best engineer, and how do you best make public policy decisions in that regard, and the better information we have, the better public decisions we're going to make. So in that regard, I do support that.

So I'm going to reserve specific questions under this area when we hit those relevant sections. So for now, those are my general comments. Thank you, Madam Chair.