Mr. Chairman, I don’t know if the Member was hoping I would have questions for him as a response...
---Laughter
As he raised the issues here there are, in fact, a number of things happening that address these larger items that are I guess we’d say pan-regional to all the aboriginal governments in the Northwest Territories.
One of the things, as I had highlighted before, that we’ve put in place during this government is to formalize our relationship with aboriginal governments with the establishment of the regional leaders meetings. Since November 2007 we’ve had five regional leaders meetings. The first one was here in Yellowknife in November 2007. We had one in Inuvik in February 2008 and again in July 2008. In October 2008 we had one in Norman Wells, and this winter -- 2009 -- we had one in Fort Simpson. Along with those there’s also a commitment to deal with the regional leaders and bilateral, so all of their chiefs or leaders, for example, in October 2008 we met with the Sahtu leadership. In November we met with the ADFN group. In January the Deh Cho group. For example, with the Gwich’in and the Inuvialuit, we’ve met with them on a number of occasions since November.
These are the meetings, especially at the regional level, where we deal with, for example, the self-government financing piece. The self-government financing piece, as we’re starting to hear now from the federal government, is their stance is changing
when it comes to incremental costs and how they’ll support self-governments after they’re signed. We are very concerned with that approach so we brought it to the table. We did a presentation to the regional leadership at the Fort Simpson meeting, and there was agreement that we need to take a common approach and develop a strategy of how we’re going to engage the federal government so that they, in fact, honour their commitment when it comes to self-government, implementation and funding of those pieces. That’s an example of how it’s starting to work and it will deal with those big picture items that we need to focus on as a group of leaders in the Territories. Thank you.