Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I appreciate the Member's comments. I just want to be clear that this is not lip service, this demonstrates our commitment to making this a reality and making this happen. With respect to change of sex designation, gender, we believe that we will be able to do the work necessary to put this into effect by April of 2017. The same is true for single names, we believe that we should be able to get the work done through regulations and others to make it official and effective in April, 2017.

Implementing Aboriginal fonts is not as simple. The department has been reaching out to the federal government over the past year about the use of Aboriginal fonts here in the Northwest Territories. Unfortunately, we were really only able to have some successful discussions as of September. To be clear, having this bill drafted and passed, in my opinion, speaks to our commitment to making this happen. Unfortunately, it will take some time. If we implement the use of Aboriginal fonts today, those residents who choose to use Aboriginal fonts on their birth certificate would be at a real disadvantage. This is the first jurisdiction in the country to do this. Granted, we are only one of two jurisdictions that recognizes languages other than English and/or French.

To make this happen, we have to do a significant amount of technical work to have these fonts recognized in electronic systems used in the Northwest Territories, in Canada, and essentially around the world. Those systems are used in social insurance numbers, passports, healthcare cards, other documents, to name just a few. If we don't do the work and we move ahead with the fonts before the work is done, our residents who utilize the fonts won't be able to get passports, they won't be able to get social insurance numbers. They won't even be able to travel outside of the Northwest Territories with a driver's licence because those driver's licences will not be consistent with the name on a boarding pass. We've all been there; they look at our driver's licence, they look at the boarding pass, if the names aren't the same, you don't get on the plane, and other jurisdictions aren't going to have our fonts.

So the work needs to be done on the transliteration guides. We also have to look at a number of databases and other programs we're using in the Northwest Territories. We anticipate there's as many as 400 databases being used by the government alone that will have to have the fonts incorporated. So it is a significant amount of work, we have nine official languages, other than French and English, that we have to incorporate into this, and we need the federal government to be supportive.

So we are committed, the department is already starting the work, they've already been in touch with Education, Culture and Employment, they've already been in touch with the feds. I'd love to say we can make this happen tomorrow, I really would, but the reality is it's going to take some time. Thank you, Mr. Chair.