Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I too will be supporting this bill in the third reading.
I, for one, feel, as a Member who’s been here for 12 years, that this is probably the first time I saw this House really cooperatively work together. We realized we had our differences but also tried to find solutions for the benefit of the people of the Northwest Territories. We also realized that we have to be flexible on both sides. We knew that we didn’t get everything we wanted, but again, there’s still a process that’s going to take place this fall by way of our business-planning process.
I think, also, that consensus government is an avenue for us to all realize that we’re here representing the people of the Northwest Territories. It doesn’t matter which side of the House you sit on. I think it’s important that we’ve shown that we can work together.
We still have a couple of years ahead of us. We have some major challenges that we’re going to have to deal with. With open minds, and people who show respect for each other and are willing to listen and to make an attempt to find a better solution than what we had in front of us when we got here some three weeks ago, I think we ended up with a better product than we started with.
More importantly, Mr. Speaker, we were able to show that we can work out our differences. We can find solutions by talking and working together. As Members on this side, one of the avenues we have is by way of motions and deletions. At the end of it all, we’ve got a better budget for it. It might not be perfect, but at least it’s something we can all work with, realizing we are going forward to another process in the fall.
With that, I’d like to thank all Members of this House for making that attempt to work through this process. Thank you.