Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, when MLAs sat together and developed the mandate, we needed a tool that we could use to serve the people of the NWT, not a document that would get dusty sitting on a shelf somewhere. My job as a Regular Member, as all of us Regular Members, and Members of the House, is to uphold, promote, and protect that mandate.

Among our mandate commitments, we included cost of living as our second priority item. Specifically, we committed that the 18^th Legislative Assembly will lower the cost of living.

Since then, here is a sample of what residents have felt impacting their cost of living in the two and a half years of this Assembly:

• Seven consecutive years of power rate increases equating to a near 40 per cent increase during that time;
• New airport taxes which increase the cost of everything through air transport;
• Increased land lease fees by up to 300 per cent;
• Increased medical service fees;
• Increased Decho bridge tolls;
• Coming soon, apparently, a land transfer tax; and
• Also coming soon, an NWT carbon tax, and that's on top of Alberta's carbon tax that we already pay on goods and services from the South.

Mr. Speaker, none of these initiatives was identified in the mandate. I was not elected by the people of Yellowknife North to support and promote those initiatives. I was elected to support the commitment we made to lower the cost of living, but so far that commitment seems a distant reality.

I agree that we have to get our fiscal house in order, but that is achieved by smart and disciplined management on a day-to-day basis, Mr. Speaker, not by spending wildly and going on hiring sprees and maxing out the line of credit on one term and then hacking, slashing, and laying workers off in the next term.

Mr. Speaker, our residents are feeling stymied in trying to move ahead in life and are finding it harder and harder to afford living here. They are continuously being penny pinched. The words "savings" and "investing" are lost. People on fixed incomes are at even higher risk from the impacts of the cost of living. Who suffers? We all do. When a family's disposable income begins to deplete, that's the beginning of a slowing economy, one that results in some saying that our territorial economic outlook appears "grim."

Mr. Speaker, the tone has to change. The trends need to start going in the right direction, and the stats must start reflecting positive outcomes. Northerners want to trust that we have their backs and that we are building a future that they can count on. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.