Thank you, Mr. Chair. I, too, had some concerns on the exemption portion of this bill, but overall analyzing the benefits created from this bill as we all said is really beneficial to the City of Yellowknife. In the context of defining "benefits" when statements were saying that if the levy is going to be directed to the incoming tourism community.

When you look back at the Department of ITI survey showing the traffic in the neighbourhood of annual tourists coming into the territories, right from the Arctic Ocean to the 60^th parallel at 108,000 visitors, being conservative and saying, even if half of that was directed to the traffic going into the city for Aurora viewing, et cetera, and calculating a formula of assumptions on an average per charge for the hotel room, and assuming that you're going to charge a levy of 3 percent, one could figure out the sales generated by this levy. I've got no concerns with that. I think it's not an innovative idea, it's done elsewhere in other jurisdictions, but it's going to create benefits that would be directed to this city.

Also on top of that, I, from a small community, look at the benefits and I outweigh the benefits and say, okay, why should we place additional levy charges to our own people who view Yellowknife as a destination to go for additional meetings? The local governments come here and make it worthwhile to meet with this government, as well as doing their own regular business in the city of Yellowknife. It might be a small amount at the end of the day on a charge-per-night basis, but it's the principle of burdening the small communities with a 3 percent charge if it is, in fact, 3 percent. That might come out to $6 per night.

When I look at that, I say to myself, let's analyze the options so we can provide options to our leadership in the communities, or even if they, in fact, want to say, well, that's just the extra costs of doing business in Yellowknife, and we're willing to accept that. That's their prerogative. For me, it's the principle of charging our own people to benefit our own people in the Northwest Territories. There's a difference between our own people in the Northwest Territories when you look at the jurisdictions of the city, the regions, and the small communities.

I thought about it for a while, talked to my colleagues, and got some clarity and some options to present to the leadership of any region outside of Yellowknife that's going to be charged this levy outside of the exemption lists. More particularly, our regional land claim governments and local governments would be charged this levy. There is other options available to negotiate something between the city and the regions or the community organizations. I just mention that for the record. Thank you, Mr. Chair.