Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Someone once said to me, “Hey, Norm, how come you keep bringing up the need for residential school survivors to get treatment and the need for the Sahtu to become an independent region?” Well, Mr. Speaker, I was thinking, what’s the connection?

Well, in both incidents we want freedom, or to be free from the shackles of being dependent on others. For the residential school survivors, it is the freedom of not being hurt, feeling the pain and knowing there is a better life, knowing that God didn’t create a person to live this kind of life and how can I break free and be a positive contributor in my family and in my community.

Now, for a region, we want to be a contributor to the North. Learn to make decisions for ourselves, learn to stand on our own, learn to walk and, even more importantly, learn to make mistakes and to learn to accept these temporary failures and move on in life.

That’s the connection between the two. At the same level, we want freedom, nothing more, nothing less, to lay the foundation for our families and our region. We want to know that our children will have a region of wealth, success and tradition, no less than a residential school survivor who comes from a rich culture, a rich family, a rich tradition of their way of life, and to break free and to go back to that way of life. Only then they will truly know who they are and

why God chose them to live here in this land. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.