Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, globally, 2006 was the sixth warmest year on record, continuing a trend of increasingly hotter years. According to scientists, the 10 warmest years since climate data started being collected on a global scale in 1961 have occurred since 1995. Since the start of the 20th Century, the global average surface temperature has risen almost approximately seven degrees Celsius. However, warming has accelerated dramatically since 1976 and is now at a rate that is approximately three times higher than that of the century scale trend.

Through the burning of fossil fuels and other activities, humans have pumped large amounts of the greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere trapping the heat at the earth's surface and causing widespread warming worldwide and this is profoundly changing the earth's climate.

Mr. Speaker, I'm talking about things on a global issue, but here we are in the Legislature, the 15th Assembly of the Government of the Northwest Territories, sitting here in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. We are the leaders. We have a role to play. This is not an activity for us to take a spectator's role. This is for us to get in the ring and start fighting because this has to do very much with us. We have a greater role and a greater opportunity to influence policy and legislation, with regard to greenhouse gas emissions, than anyone else. If legislators don't have an opportunity to affect the outcomes with respect to these issues, who does? I think it's high time that we stopped taking a sideline approach to this issue and get more active and more outspoken about this.

I, for one, as a Member of this Legislature, do not know what our government's position is on the incredulous expansion of the Alberta Athabasca tar sands project just south of us. I don't know what this government's position is on the creation of a hydro dam on the Slave River. I don't know who goes to the meetings and represents us except, perhaps, some senior bureaucrats when these kinds of issues are being discussed. I think they are too important to leave to our staff, as good as they may be at communicating our position. I believe that these issues need to be elevated to the position of Premier and the highest level of discussions in our land, because Canadians expect that of us...