Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The issue of the department’s human resource plan and affirmative action, more specifically, has been one that we’ve dealt with for some time, some initially would say, and challenged us to step up to the plate here and make some changes in the area of delivery. I must say that, or sometimes I would say, the concern about our aboriginal affairs status or percentage of employees is one that we’ve taken to heart. Although, I must say that our success has also been our challenge in the sense we’ve had some of our managers go through here and then get picked up by other departments and move on. One of the things we’ve been working on, along with the Department of Human Resources, is to come up with our human resource plan in the area of looking at our aboriginal content within the department. An example of what we’ve done in this last year is the associate director position where we’ve gone through and we put out for a position that aboriginal people could apply for. They had to be an affirmative action candidate and come into the department at an associate director position and get additional work in that area. We had very good success in that area. Of course, there are many more candidates that we would like to see pursue along these plans and, in fact, I think this example should be undertaken overall by the government through our Department of Human Resources and look at this area so we can have similar positions with our departments to move forward.

Specifically under this section of intergovernmental affairs, there are only six people in this section. One is an aboriginal P1 candidate; two are non-

aboriginal but long-time Northerners. So 50 percent of this section make up those stats. Thank you.