Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the Member for his comments on the Heritage Fund. We just remind the folks that are listening that this is what we do agree on. We agree on a Heritage Fund because

we spent three years in the 16th Assembly putting a

bill into place that would give us the legal authority and looking forward to the day that devolution would be upon us. We know we have to put money aside and the one figure that the Member didn’t say, and there were some folks that said it, more than one, and more than one community, that we shouldn’t put any aside, that we need it all today, but two Assemblies have agreed that we need to put money aside, so now we’re talking about how much.

We know we’re getting $120 million a year. That’s been planned for some time. Half of it goes back to the feds. The remaining 25 percent goes to the Aboriginal governments and then we will look at the remaining roughly $45 million. At the same time, we’ve finalized, to the extent possible at this point, additional costs like the $350 million Stanton renovation that has to be paid for and that’s a long-term commitment. We’ve got to conclude the commitment on the Inuvik-Tuk highway and we have a $3 billion infrastructure deficit that we’re trying to pick away at. So when that money comes in, modest as it is, it has to do three things. We want to put money in the Heritage Fund and we want to service our debt to keep us below interest payments of 5 percent of our revenues and we want to try to add money to our infrastructure plus meet the constant demands for more program enhancements and service expansion. We hear it in this House, we hear it wherever we go, to manage all that money, put money away, give us all this money, usually in the social program area, to expand programs and services and keep the money the same, try to do some economic infrastructure or in some cases don’t do that, let’s just put it all in the social programs, but let’s just keep growing government.

So it’s a challenge and it’s easier to sit here and suggest on one thing, just put in 25 percent and those other issues will sort themselves out, which we don’t have the luxury of looking at.

Let me restate, we’ve started a process here. We’ve got a budget on the table and now we’re in the process of having a discussion and it’s come down to the Heritage Fund, which is a very specific topic, which points out to me once again that we agree to a significant vast majority of the budget that’s before this House. So now we have to sort out the Heritage Fund and the issue of other requests for additional funding over and above what’s in the budget in addition to the Heritage Fund.

We’re interested in resolving this and this is the forum where we’re going to do it, and we’re committed to having that discussion to get us to that point. Thank you.