Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a couple of things on the Department of Justice. I have talked to the Minister about the promotion and the way that aboriginal employees in the corrections system can expect to move their careers along. We’ve had a back and forth here last week on a situation that I’ve encountered with a constituent. I know the department is doing its best to try to recruit aboriginal people into the corrections field, but you have to nurture, foster and develop these employees so that they can ultimately take on mid-management and senior management positions within corrections. To not do that I think is doing a disservice to the people we’re hiring at the very start. I think the Minister understands that and I hope the department does, too, that there’s some improvement that’s needed there.

A couple other things I wanted to mention, and I’ve mentioned this to the Minister in the past, but when we look at opportunities for economic development here in the Northwest Territories I often think that given the aging infrastructure of federal penitentiaries in southern Canada, the federal

government is going to have to build a new penitentiary somewhere in this country and with that would come 350, 400 jobs and it would be a big-time economic boost to any community that a federal penitentiary could be located in. I’ve asked the Minister previously to have that discussion with the federal Minister of Justice to at least run it by him and say that we’re interested, we’re looking for opportunities to attract people to the Northwest Territories and get people to live here and what better opportunity than a federal penitentiary? I mean, that would be a big win for the Northwest Territories if we could get a federal penitentiary located in one of our communities here in the Northwest Territories. So I think that’s something we should try to stay on top of, because ultimately a decision will be made to build a new federal penitentiary and it should be located in the Northwest Territories, if we have anything to say about it or we can lobby the right people to make that happen.

I’ve spoken about this before, too, but I’ll just raise it again while I’ve got the floor. I don’t think the government should close the door completely on this courthouse issue here in Yellowknife. You know, it’s a big expenditure of dollars, yes, but it’s a piece of public infrastructure representing the judiciary that will be in place for many, many years. If you look at any other capital city around this country, or a commonwealth for that matter, I mean, they have dedicated courthouse facilities. Our courthouse here, oftentimes we find ourselves having to patch it up and spend little pots of capital dollars here and there on trying to shore that facility up and we’ve probably paid for that building ten times over, Mr. Chairman. To me it would make sense to finally just bite the bullet, get a courthouse, a dedicated facility here. If it’s in conjunction with some other government office space requirements... I know the program review office just went through an office space requirement study here in Yellowknife, which indicated that the Government of the Northwest Territories should proceed and construct a 6,000 square metre office building here in Yellowknife. The first thing I thought of was, well, if they’re going to construct a 6,000 square foot office building, maybe the courthouse could be incorporated into that somehow, someway for economies of scale and maybe a lot of the Justice staff could be located in that new office building. It would be something I think that’s worth investigating further, Mr. Chairman. Again, I was sad to see the government close the door on the courthouse and it’s something I think you can expect to hear me talk about more in the next little while, and hopefully one day I’m around to see it actually happen, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.