Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to also talk about the draft agreement-in-principle for devolution and resource revenue sharing that has been achieved between the federal government negotiators and the GNWT negotiators.
As long as I have been a Member of this House, the Regular Members, and maybe even the Cabinet Ministers, have literally ground on whoever the leader was to advance the agenda of the Northwest Territories when it comes to resource revenue sharing and devolution. We told Joe Handley that he should be like Ghandi and walk to Ottawa to make a statement how we should have northern resources controlled in the North, as the federal government continues to be the gatekeeper on the development and management of our resources, and how as development proceeds and advances that our chances of getting the kind of deal that we need would actually probably diminish.
When we look at an opportunity like the Mackenzie Gas Project that’s ahead of us, and you look at many other projects, and you look at the royalties that those kinds of projects could generate and how we in the North could share in the benefits of that, it’s pretty exciting and it’s pretty amazing.
I am not here to say that I represent anybody other than my constituency and we haven’t even had a chance to discuss this yet, but listening to Mr. Krutko it sounded like he was representing the voice of the aboriginal people of the Northwest Territories. I’m here as an MLA and I’m not here to collectively speak for anybody. I will say that we have an opportunity before us. It is a draft. It is an agreement-in-principle. It is not a final document. I think it would be responsible on all of our parts to look at this very seriously.
I, for one -- as Mr. Krutko often says -- would like to congratulate the government and congratulate this Premier for putting together...
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...a credible team of negotiators that went to Ottawa and negotiated those federal negotiators right to the edge of their mandate and came back here with something for us to talk about. We’ve got something to talk about. Let’s show the leadership we won’t ruin this or blow this thing up before it even gets out of the gate.