I apologize. Good chairman. I apologize to the Premier and the chair. Thanks for keeping me on track. This question will come up again when we go through detail.

Mr. Chairman, I will have some questions in terms of our full participation or partnership in the Canadian Federation. I believe the Premier has some strategy on how to get there. Resource revenue sharing is certainly the biggest one. Devolution, well, we've been doing that for the last number of years and the Premier sometimes needs to be reminded on the number of years we have been dealing with devolution. I suppose I am more interested in our strategy as a small territory. We have some partnerships within the provinces of Canada and hopefully one day we will have some significant impacts on the Constitution and have some authority, I would say, in terms of province responsibilities and authority. To have that type of leverage, it would be in the Federation of Canada here. Of course, we have ongoing negotiations with several communities on self-government to a point where the Tlicho now is implementing their self-government land claim agreement. I am very curious as to the future of the Northwest Territories. We have these different models of self-government being negotiated. They want to have different jurisdictions, almost state-like authority that, when we negotiate these self-government agreements and models, the territorial government will have a role to play. To what extent I am not too sure, the extent of the authority they will have, the role. I believe that it could be something like where the federal government now has a role in Canada with each province assuming some responsibility. I am going to make that presumption that would happen in the Northwest Territories, also that each jurisdiction will have some authority of its own and then the other territorial-wide authority will devolve to this government here because we are such a small province. I think that might be a way of looking at it.

I guess I'm just looking at it in terms of long-term visioning and long-term planning in terms of these negotiations. It might be 10 or 15 years from now. I will ask the Premier that question in terms of long-term vision and planning, how he sees these negotiations playing itself out in the type of authority that the communities are negotiating. Are we, as a territorial government, supporting the aboriginal governments, supporting our own government? What road do we see ourselves in? Some of the communities still have a different view as how the inherent right to self-government is interpreted and how we interpret it. How important is our relationship with the communities? Those types of questions I will wait until later on.

The other one there is how we are funding and how we are looking after our aboriginal organizations. Those questions will come up in detail, so I want to say that to the Premier. Those would be my opening comments. Thank you, Mr. Chair.