Thank you, Mr. Speaker. With regard to access to diamonds, since the diamonds were first discovered the diamond industry has been one of the big success stories for the

Northwest Territories. We’re now third in the world in production of diamonds, behind Russia and Botswana. We’re even ahead of South Africa. Part of the issue is that we are a territory, so the federal government owns the resources.

The problem we had as a government was how to receive benefits from the diamond industry itself. The government of the day was able to successfully negotiate with the diamond companies, which was unprecedented at the time. Since then, we’ve seen that other sovereign countries have started to follow the process we’ve been taking.

The industry provides 10 per cent of the allocations for manufacturing in the Northwest Territories.