Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to follow up and thank Mr. Hawkins for his support. I, of course, did not mention anything about selling art; I talked about display and exhibition of art. Nor did I mention anything about free space. I, in fact, mentioned that Heritage Canada is interested in partnering and paying for this infrastructure. I just wanted to express my appreciation for his support there on my main points.
I think there’s been a good discussion on this need for a good policy. One of the priorities for this government is diversification of our economy and I think it’s well understood that the arts are a real opportunity to make progress on that diversification. Certainly featuring, displaying, promoting arts is a real opportunity, given that they typically don’t have the infrastructure themselves. It’s on that basis that I think we would like to see a policy.
I appreciate the Minister’s suggestion that the Executive would be the appropriate one for this. I guess I would just like to ask the Minister if he would take this forward to the Executive and seek this sort of policy for new GNWT infrastructure from now on across the NWT at 1 percent or something like that in support of the arts.
I think, although I did not ask for free space in the infrastructure in Yellowknife, I think in some of our
small communities where they don’t have many opportunities at all it would not be out of line to consider providing free space for the display of arts in our government infrastructure.