Marci, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, there are two things I want to touch on. I know the Member from Yellowknife North touched on it, but just to add a bit to what he said.

The first one is on the Community Access Roads Program. The Community Access Roads Program is a program that is in place as a program that Regular Members are trying to get government to add money into. I believe that this money that is spent in the communities is very beneficial to the communities and has an element of people who could be doing labour work. It has people who could do slashing, chainsaw work and also people who could run equipment, drive truck, loaders and whatnot, all of the little elements of training individuals.

This program also is a good candidate for other programs, like the community mining program, where individuals are training to get better skills to eventually work at one of the mines. This program is always underfunded. Normally, the community is not asking for a whole lot of money in this program, and this particular time we are asking for this money, I think, for one reason: to put a little bit of money, more than the usual, towards the Willow Lake project in Aklavik. It is something that has been, I think, going on for a long time, and I think it is time to put some money towards it to try to get the project moving forward and, of course, projects of most of the community.

I know that, in the last couple of years, most of the communities have indicated that they have access roads that they would like to see out from their communities, accessing traditional areas. There are a couple of communities where there are lakes just within a few kilometres, and they just don't have the money or the equipment to be able to open those roads up. So it is so beneficial. There are also areas where they can have an opportunity to access gravel. A lot of times, communities don't access gravel. This kind of gives them the possibility that they could buy a crusher or something and generate their own gravel, crush their own gravel.

For me, and I think for most of the Members on this side of the House, we feel that this is a very important program and it should be funded appropriately. Right now, it is not, so a lot of these projects start and have to stop right away because there is not enough funding in place.

The second point I would like to just touch on is the amalgamation of the two departments. Just in general, I am opposed to laying people off. It has just never proven that it is a good strategy. You save the money that you were paying to the individual, that particular individual, but you are losing in all kinds of areas. If individuals have to leave the North, you lose that transfer payment. If individuals put their houses up for sale when they lose their jobs and they have to move somewhere else, then that affects the housing market in those particular communities, wherever they are. Our markets are very small. Yellowknife has the biggest market, of course, but there are only a few market communities in the NWT, and if these lay-offs affect that, you see the impact of that.

Now, we could get into all of what it is like to have some equity in your home and what you can do with that equity and how you can work with that equity to put money back into the economy. Instead of getting into all that, all we have talked about all of that for a long period of time. The government is moving forward with laying people off. I think it is a mistake, but it is probably going to happen.

Also, one of the things that I have always talked about during the time there are cutbacks is: when the government goes to the process of doing layoffs, are they following the affirmative action policy? That is something that I want to keep an eye on, because the first reaction that I am hearing from people is that they are not.

If there is an amalgamation and there are a couple of people who end up in one job, then those individuals, they don't necessarily follow the affirmative action policy. I don't want to see this department come out the other end and say, "Well, we laid off these people and most of them were Aboriginal people, didn't have the skills or education to retain those jobs." I have seen it. I have gone through it. I have seen it when I was in the government. Things were brought to me, proposing to look at the list of people who were laid off. At one point, they were all Aboriginal, all of the layoffs. We have the very low number of Priority 1 candidates in the GNWT as it is. I don't think we should be targeting those guys when the layoffs are happening as a result of the amalgamation, this amalgamation and other ones. Thank you.