Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's probably a long road that we would have to go down before we would get to seeing a university in the Northwest Territories. When you look at something like the University of Alberta, it's got more students than the Northwest Territories has residents. Even its smaller campus, the one in Camrose, has a huge number of students in comparison to what our population is, even. So we probably have a long way to go, given the costs of running a full-fledged university, but we have explored with two courses, as the Member pointed out, the Bachelor of Education and the Bachelor of Science program for nursing, various ways of granting degrees. I would think that would be a much preferred way to go in the near term; to look at how we might partner with other educational institutions, universities, to deliver the full four years in the North where we can and where it makes economic sense.

One thing that I have also discussed with my colleagues from the Yukon and Nunavut was a joint approach to a university. Looking at the population of all three territories, it's pretty tough with even 70,000 people to justify supporting a university. But I thought that it might make some sense for us to look at what we could do on a

joint approach, dividing up our specialties among the three different territories perhaps, and then knowing how much money is spent on research in the North and how much of that money is provided to university chairs by the Government of Canada, I thought that that might be an approach that we could take a look at. So there has been some interest expressed by the Minister from Nunavut. It's a new Minister from the Yukon since I last broached this subject, so I need to again talk to the Minister from Yukon. Unfortunately, the new Minister didn't attend...or I didn't have a chance to talk to the Minister. It was Nunavut that didn't attend that last meeting. But we haven't had a chance for the three of us to get together and try and move this forward, although there was at one point some interest from my two colleagues.