Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, will be supporting this motion in its entirety only because it is about time that our federal government recognizes, once again, that the costs, indeed, are that much higher here in the North. Yellowknife, of course, is impacted quite a bit, but even more so in the smaller communities. A lot of the bigger costs are as I spoke about and continue to speak about and how it is due to transportation and fuel costs. It has a huge bearing on it lately, as well. If there is a way of putting money back into our northern residents instead of taking it out, I think this is one of the ways that our federal government is going to recognize that. There will be more money for our residents in order to run their households in the smaller communities.

I would like to be very supportive of ongoing annual indexing that it speaks about in the motion. If that was in place the first time instead of them just enabling legislation to give us the northern residency deduction in the taxation act back in 1991, our indexing, it would have helped a bit. It would have helped a lot, actually. I think the estimate said that if it was indexed, we would have been around $6,800 for a northern residency deduction if they indexed it from 1991.

That is something that should have been in there. I would like to see it brought up again with our federal counterparts as they deliberate their new budget shortly, or in their term at least, Mr. Speaker. With that, I am very supportive of this motion. I look forward to its passage. I look forward to our honourable Premier carrying this torch to Ottawa along with many of the other needs and requests that are specific to the North that will help us improve the lives of our people and our communities. Mahsi cho.