The message that’s gone out is one from our office at the Executive because we held the agreements with the groups and have identified them in past discussions. The groups had to sign off and sign contribution agreements. The summit process was one that was initially made up of the leadership. The Member is correct that it did get tied into hiring of a lot of additional... Well, I don’t know if it was a lot, but it was considered to take out and it evolved into more of, for no better words, a bureaucratic process between consultants and lawyers and groups with some mixing of political leadership. Clearly the work that was done still was in the format and developing the agreement-in-principle and as you look forward when you go back and look at the year 2007, the work that was done by the summit lead to an agreement signed by the then Government of the Northwest Territories and a number of the Aboriginal groups and that got sent in to Ottawa. Of course we know that did not get endorsed by the federal government and I might say probably thankfully, because at that point it had even lesser financial value than this agreement holds. We can clearly put out the numbers there and it would be up to the groups to point out who they hired and the specific purposes that they hired the lawyers for and some of the consultants.
More importantly, going forward, looking at this and where we are today, in the life of this government we’ve tried to build that regional leadership table to move forward on key initiatives and the letter that we sent out to the regional leaders and the community leadership, again we’re reaching out to find a way forward on this process. Some of the difficulty lies, and because we’re so many different tables at different levels we do have, as the Member pointed out, land claims that are established and protected. We have one self-government in the Northwest Territories that’s a comprehensive process and then we have a number of groups negotiating a comprehensive process or, as the Member for Nahendeh mentioned, the Dehcho process has felt they need to go through that process. That does make it very complicated. That’s why we’re prepared to come back to the Assembly through a supplementary process to get additional dollars and respond to the
request to go into the communities to go through the agreement-in-principle. The issue becomes, as much as I said at the Sahtu meetings I was at recently, that the issue of self-government and self-government financing are much bigger than the agreement-in-principle. Clearly the agreement-in-principle is a drawing down of existing authorities now practiced, in a sense, by the federal government and their staff. We’re trying to pull that into the North.