At one point in the history of the Government of the Northwest Territories, when the talk of devolution and resource revenue sharing came up, the federal government’s position was unanimity across the North. We’ve been in these discussions for well over 20 years now. There have been past governments who’ve put their case forward to the federal government to say, “Could we at least look at a significant majority and not unanimity?” That position has been agreed to.
The past government had a number of the organizations sign a joint letter with the GNWT and forwarded that to the federal government. We haven’t had an official response from them. The start of this government has been to begin again sitting down with regional leadership, trying to come up with a common position. We know that some regional leadership was concerned about moving ahead, but this budget is an example. If we don’t move ahead, we’re facing more of these areas of not moving forward when we know there’s a revenue stream going to Ottawa. The fact is that we don’t need everyone on side. Our preference would be to get as many groups as possible in agreement to move forward.