Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve already mentioned this letter a number of times in this House by the Member and spoke to the reasons it’s taken so long, apologized for the delay in some of them, but with all the events happening, it was better to respond with a full deck of cards and positions and send those responses out.

In the letter that I sent back to the president of the Gwich’in Tribal Council, we touched on those issues that he raised. In fact, we spoke of the fact that a number of those issues were outside of the agreement-in-principle and would be better dealt with, as I was saying in an earlier response, through other tables and other discussions, or final agreements in other areas such as self-government.

We’ve responded to that letter and I know that the president may not be happy with that response, but it is our position that a number of those issues are outside of the agreement-in-principle. There are a number of issues raised in the letter that we feel are actually a part of the negotiations to go forward. For example, resource revenue sharing, that is part of the agreement-in-principle under Section 12 that talks about having bilaterals with Aboriginal governments in the Northwest Territories. So there are a number of areas that we address where we feel we could better deal with those as we go forward. We would work with all the leadership, giving them time to respond to the letters that were sent by the chief negotiators, as well as work on and sit down together to work on a protocol to see us go forward on the AIP. Unfortunately, that fell through at the eleventh hour, but hopefully with those principles that I believe are common to all the

parties, we’ll be able to use that and go forward in the next steps. Thank you.