Thank you, Madam Chair. The Minister has been telling us, the people and the public, through the newspapers, and telling everybody that we really need to watch our financial spending for the next couple of years before we start to look at how we reap what we sow in year three and four. The Minister, for me, has his hands on the pulse of the fiscal. He’s like when these big planes are flown and there’s the pilot and the co-pilot and he is navigator. The navigator is there to tell you how much fuel you have, what kind of weather, where it’s raining, everything. The Minister is like that within our government. He knows where the fiscal is, what’s happening. We’re coming close to our borrowing limit or we’re getting broke or we’re spending too much. Just like the navigator. He’s telling the pilot how far we are from the town we’re going to. He will tell you how far we’re going. He watches everything. The Finance Minister, for me, is like that on the fiscal realities of our government.

In here the Minister has pointed out some things that we need to be aware of. One of the things that we have made a decision on was to help the small communities and we’re making this contribution back to the NTPC to support them. More important, it’s to support our residents in the communities.

I want to ask the Minister in here if he has looked at all the revenue. One of the things we talked about, I think Mr. Bromley talked a little bit about it, was called the resource rental revenue. I think we talked about the Resource Management Act as something that we could take advantage of all the resources that are possibly happening here in the Northwest Territories. How do we do that? Is that through a devolution process? For me in here we are in devolution and we are in that process. We are going to implement the devolution deal. The way it reads here, there are no ands, ifs or buts about it. We’re going through that process. Having the Aboriginal governments with us through that process, we’re going to put a deal together. That’s what I read. That supporting the efforts to ensure the success or completion of a Devolution Final

Agreement and then the implementation of that agreement. For me, we are walking that road. It’s plain and clear here. I guess now we need to get our ducks in order to make this happen, to make it to our best advantage.

I want to just ask the Minister on the resource revenue, the avenues that we could look at to take advantage of the tax regimes and how do we continue to watch our spending for years one and two, and then look at how do we go about making some of these tough decisions amongst ourselves, to know which projects will get the green light and which ones will get the red light and wait until the 18

th Assembly. With devolution, how are we going

to see some of this revenue stay here for sure, in the Northwest Territories?

The previous Minister we had was on the position of decentralization, and there are some numbers here that I looked through again, and as I told the previous Minister about some of the positions that stay in Yellowknife, we’re pretty close to some numbers here. I know that some of these positions, I quoted at 62 full-time positions and six part-time positions being added to the GNWT because of the sunsets and deleted positions, Yellowknife is probably about to 30 to 34 positions. I may be a little off with those numbers for accuracy. Probably we’re looking at the $4 million coming into Yellowknife. That’s still quite a lot of money.

Those are some of the questions, I guess. Throughout the life of this government, we could have some debate as to the merits of them. I want to close off this discussion with my comments here.