I guess the overall target of the Government of the Northwest Territories, as raised in this House a number of times, is to try to build capacity in the industry in the Northwest Territories amongst our businesspeople, whether Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal, birthright corporations and so on. We’ve done that and we use a number of tools. Negotiated contracts is one of those.

Some of the difficulty we have is when in the same community or region there is, in a sense, a competition. When you have two Aboriginal companies requesting negotiated contracts it becomes problematic. We use the tools available to us and tendering in the region is one of those that can be used. In a sense, when you just look at the overall percentage that we’ve achieved, at 84 percent shows that many of the companies in the Sahtu are quite able to compete and be successful in that environment. The Negotiated Contracts

Policy itself, my understanding is through the regional office there has been workshops held in the past on that and we’ll look to see when it was last done and if that could be seen again.

Part of the other issue is I know Minister Bob McLeod through his shop and on the MOU has been working with the Sahtu Secretariat Incorporated to look at finalizing the work around the MOU as one of the tools as well.