Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is right; we have been negotiating devolution and resource revenue sharing for at least 20 years, and every government has been frustrated with a lack of progress in this area. It has become increasingly important because of the wealth we're getting from Norman Wells oil and also from the diamond mines, and hopefully from the natural gas in the Territories.
Mr. Speaker, we don't permit or issue certification or licences and so on; that's all federal and that's frustrating to us, too. But we don't get to decide whether a project goes ahead or doesn't go ahead. The federal government controls that. They control the environmental assessment process. They take the wealth out of it. It's Crown land, federal Crown land, not our land. So we all end up losing and we're sitting here watching what's going on. We don't have a direct way or direct alternative to negotiations. In fact, it isn't even a fair negotiating session because we don't have much to negotiate with other than our persuasion and our pleading with them and with the Canadian public. We've gotten the Premiers across the country onside and the Finance Ministers across the country onside with us. We've made a lot of progress here, but still they hold the cards.
Mr. Speaker, the only other alternative for us would be for us to try and have our own tax system or something that would be loaded on top of what the federal government has, and that is not a good signal to set out to industry so we don't want to go there. So, Mr. Speaker, I am counting on this federal government to take steps that no other government has done and do what nobody else has done for the last 20 years. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.