Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We are at work on the Heritage Fund and we will come to a successful conclusion. If I have misstated the support for junior kindergarten, I will use other examples of the input

and involvement and significant influence that MLAs have on this process overall.

We agree there are too many fly-in/fly-out workers, which is why we struck a high level committee. We set a target of trying to increase our population by 2,000 in five years, and one of the things we want to look at – there are a number of things; there are four things, actually, we want to look at – the fly-in/fly-out workers, the immigrant Nominee Program, our own vacancy rate and vacancy rates across the territory; and of course, doing a better job of encouraging our own students who graduate to come back and live in the Northwest Territories.

It is an important issue. The Member says, how beneficial is all that training when they get trained and oftentimes they leave? Well, the reality is we want our children to have as many opportunities and be as well educated as possible. Right now a significant portion of our young people leave, but they leave educated and they have choices. As a parent and a grandparent, that’s what we want for our children. Our job is now to convince a significant number of them to, in fact, choose to live in the North and work in the North, and we’re going to do that. Hopefully, we’re going to collectively apply ourselves to that.

The issue of big infrastructure is not the answer; I agree. It’s not a silver bullet, but it is an important issue when so much of our territory lacks basic infrastructure. The issue of immaturity and folks wanting everything right away and not being content to be patient, the actual fact is, in my mind, we are a patient people but we have needs. There are communities that are extremely well served with every kind of resource and infrastructure that other communities can only hope for, then there are others where we don’t even have roads into the communities and we need to pay for everything. While people are patient, they’ve been waiting for, in many cases, decades.

It’s something to say that people that want roads, people that want jobs, people that want infrastructure in communities are immature and they should wait and somehow it will trickle down to them I don’t think is the way we want to do business. If it is, then we would have a lot less ambitious plans for trying to make sure the economy and the economic base grows.

It doesn’t have to grow just in mining; we’re talking about filling the jobs in the communities. We’re putting in fibre optic lines that are going to give us a whole knowledge-based industry, hopefully. We’re going to put services in the communities that will allow things to work, systems to work more efficiently and effectively for us as a government, for people as individuals and for businesses. We have to look at all areas, but we cannot be blind to the reality that $2.5 billion a year comes out of the diamond mines.

If we want to roll back the clock to the good old days and take that out of our economy, then I would think we’re talking a very, very deep type of recession. I don’t think anybody wants to say that, but we have a very important role in our economy at this point, and I think we have to be working collaboratively with them in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way as possible to expand our economic base. We still are of the mind, and for me it’s very clear, that increasing taxes is not what’s going to get us to where we have to go.

I look forward to further discussion with the Member as we go through department by department. I’m sure in 10 or six weeks, with give and take with the Member, hopefully my narrow thinking will be somewhat broader. Thank you.