Mr. Speaker, I disagree with what the Member stated about not honouring those agreements. In fact, clearly, during the life of this Assembly, we can show many examples of where we have gone above and beyond working with Aboriginal organizations and governments across the Northwest Territories, right from working together on the Water Strategy, the Wildlife Act, where the groups have joined us in writing the act, to the agreement-in-principle and devolution process. In fact, the door remains open for them to join the process and, in fact, help design some of the negotiation mandates that would be there when it is a joint mandate that we would approach the federal government on, for example. We have gone a long ways. In fact, right from when the letters were initiated by the chief negotiators to Minister Duncan’s office and to my office, as well as letters gone directly to each regional leader about the agreement-in-principle and the work done.

We have worked with the groups starting in November, after the chance to do their internal review. We sat with them early in November, in December, in January. In fact, January 23

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we held the meeting and had more work done towards the protocol and even provided that I would be available to pull myself out of meetings if they wanted to change some of that language to go forward. What happened there? The groups, instead of working on additional language and requesting that I come out of those meetings, worked on a protest. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.