Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I listen with great interest to what some of my colleagues have to say. I have a great deal of respect for the Members who have been here for a number of years and have been fighting in the trenches to carve out a future here in the Northwest Territories and I take what they say seriously. I can't take issue with the fact that we need a framework or we have to develop a framework. I want to get back to why I was fundamentally opposed to the four new positions in Finance. You can develop a framework, Mr. Chairman. You can go out and do the road show, get the comments from the public, the business community, and have a contractor draw up a policy. That's all fine and good and that might take a couple years to develop a policy, but why do you need four people in a policy shop when, again, we are on a fixed income? Absolutely. You want to talk about spending? We spend $550 million of that $1.1 billion on salaries. We spend another $230 million on contracted services. We know where most of that money is going. So what's left over to deal with? Without a resource revenue deal, without increased revenue here, is there a need to have four people working in a policy shop? That's what I'm opposed to, Mr. Chairman.
One other thing that I want mention here, too, is how real -- and I've mentioned this in this House before -- how real is the economy of the Northwest Territories? I'm serious about this. There are so many business ventures that are business ventures out of convenience; groups getting money, a small percentage, to go into a joint venture with another company from southern Canada or the United States or, in some cases, Europe, Mr. Chairman. They get into bed with these other companies, get a small percentage. The majority of that contracted service provided by these companies leaves the Northwest Territories, doesn't even stay here. In fact, we spend millions and millions of dollars ourselves as a government in southern Canada. How real is the economy here?
Those are basic questions and I think that's what we really have to get a grip on, is what dollars actually stay here and what do we base all of this on. I know it was a big piece of work that the department has undertaken to come up with a framework but, again, I think there was a contractor that was involved there tasked with developing a framework and maybe I could ask the Minister, on a day-to-day basis, what are these four employees in this shop going to be doing? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.