Thanks, Mr. Chair. I’m looking at page 128, which is the revenue summary. I see that Tobacco Tax revenues are $15.6 million; liquor revenues are $23.5 million. I add them up. Generally, it looks like about $39 million in revenues there from tobacco and liquor. Then I look at the net resource revenues that we get to keep from mining and oil and gas. That is found on Roman numeral xii of the main estimates. It looks like the amount that we actually get to keep from non-renewable resource revenue, so that is mining and oil and gas, is $13 million.

Look, I understand that 50 per cent of the non-renewable resource revenues go back to the feds and they claw that back through formula funding. We have to transfer some of the resource revenues to the Aboriginal governments, but my point here is we actually collect three times as much revenue from tobacco and liquor as we do from mining and oil and gas. That just doesn’t seem quite right to me.

Courtesy of the Chamber of Mines today, I find out that the value of mineral production in 2016 from the Northwest Territories was $1.276 billion. Something just doesn’t seem quite right here to me. Is the department willing to look at other forms of taxation that would allow us to capture more revenues from mining and oil and gas? Whether it’s a capital investment tax, a resource tax, what is it that we can do to try to retain more the benefits from oil and gas and mining and get the revenues from those activities? Thanks, Mr. Chair.