Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just a couple of quick questions on this section. When Education, Culture and Employment was in front of us I asked some questions about some of the things you’re doing. One of the things you’re doing is supporting arts and culture, obviously through things like the NWT Arts Society and whatnot, and I’m about to say something I know the Minister has heard from me before, but when it comes to tourism supporting the arts is a great advantage. I mean, people are looking for reasons to come to the North, people are looking for activities and, yes, we have aurora and, yes, we have some of the most beautiful land on the planet and, yes, we have a lot of cultural activities going on, but we can’t exclude art and those types of things. Musicians, festivals, arts conferences, arts fairs.
In my opening comments I was happy to see that there is some increase in your SEED program for artists, but not performers and I think in the tourism area by supporting our artists and finding ways to partner with them and have them act as our champions is a good thing. It’s good for the artists, it’s good for the Northwest Territories because it will draw attention and those musicians and painters and authors and whatnot could be brilliant ambassadors for us. We’ve got Make Your Mark right now, which I think is a fairly decent program, but if we had some of our local talent out there making their mark as well and supporting them, I think we’d be getting a real bang for our buck in that area.
So with the new Tourism Strategy that just came out, what are we doing to work with Education, Culture and Employment who has invested a lot of money in our artists to find partnership opportunities to work with them, including Education, Culture and the artists and have these people work as ambassadors or out there pushing their art, but pushing the Northwest Territories as well?