Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’d like to thank the Member for his comments. I appreciate the comment that it’s not a bad budget, and then he woke up and realized that it was true, it was not a bad budget. I appreciate those comments. We do share the sense of success that we’re the only jurisdiction in the country that has worked out a renewable resource sharing agreement with Aboriginal governments where a share goes from the gross revenues of 25 percent.

The Member and I have had many discussions about how long it takes to move government and how long it takes to change things or get things added. In the Member’s case, he mentioned the on-the-land healing programs, the long-term care facility that was started probably back in the 15th Assembly. In discussions we’ve had – I think I was Health Minister at the time – we’ve moved on, and if I can speak just a bit to the Sahtu, I mean, there was a significant reference to it in the budget address both in terms of concerns with the development. If the Member searches back through his memory, he’ll have seen reference to the Wrigley to Norman Wells road, for example, and we are going to work with communities.

You asked what is the cost of hydro and what about the other communities down the valley that aren’t on hydro, and we have a full perspective when it comes to energy initiatives. I think we are almost national leaders when it comes to biomass development. We are doing some unique things with solar. We started in Simpson. We have a very interesting pilot project that’s going to be going into place in Colville Lake with combining solar, wind and batteries, as well, potentially offsetting up to 50 percent of the diesel. If we can get that worked out, then we see small communities being in a situation where we can put their costs of energy down. We

also see an opportunity to expand the LNG rollout to all those communities that are on a road system. It might not apply most immediately to the Sahtu until they get their Wrigley to Norman Wells road, but it would definitely apply to other communities like Liard, McPherson, Tsiigehtchic, Wrigley and those types of communities. We are very serious about that.

There will be a full debate on the hydro, and it’s all predicated on us getting our borrowing limit increased. If we are unsuccessful getting our borrowing limit increased, then life will be a whole lot simpler. We won’t be talking about the road to Norman Wells or Wrigley, at least not in our political lifetime, and we won’t be looking at hydro grid expansion. We’ll be looking at constantly managing to try to live within an $800 million borrowing limit with the pressures we face right today, which for a jurisdiction that is as big as ours with a budget that is as big as ours is an administrative constraint that is not reflected in the fiscal reality of our debt to GDP ratio and our credit rating and our percentage of revenues that we spend on interest payments, which is less than 1 percent when our policy caps us at 5. So with devolution, if we don’t get that ability and devolution is going to be in, our development, an advancement is going to be severely constrained by our inability to make critical investments that are necessary.

When we talk about critical investments, you mentioned all the graduates coming out of Sahtu, which is a significant achievement after you have worked long and hard to reach that point. We have acknowledged that we want to do a better job of how we deal with our post-secondary graduates. We want to encourage, of course, high school graduates to carry on their education, be it in post-secondary institutions or as apprentices. The average job requirement now requires 16 years of education, so there are things that you can do out of Grade 12 as you sort yourself out, get your thinking clear about what you want to do, travel, do these other things, but at the end of the day we want to encourage Northerners and northern graduates to carry on with their education because we have, as we’ve heard in this House since we’ve started this Assembly, concerns about vacancies not only just in government but across the territory in all sectors, in small communities, in Aboriginal governments, in major mining industries – everybody is looking for skilled individuals – administrators, technicians, engineers, doctors. We’ve spent millions with nursing programs and social work programs, the ENRTP programs and business admin programs in addition to working out relationships with various universities so you can get your degrees.

We have a lot of infrastructure in place but we know we want to do better. I would like to congratulate the Sahtu, and of course the Member here is

justifiably proud of that accomplishment. We are looking at jobs, we are putting in millions of dollars of housing in small communities so that we can fill positions, and we are going to do a better job at recruiting, hopefully, our young graduates to come back and live and work in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.