Thank you, Mr. Speaker. November 4, 2016, this Legislative Assembly passed Bill 5, which was a bill to amend sections of the Vital Statistics Act that would allow us to use traditional fonts on legal documents such as birth certificates and other vital statistics documents. This is a commitment we made. This is a commitment we intend to and will live up to. Our ultimate goal is to be able to have traditional names on our birth certificates, on our vital statistics documents, using the traditional font, which is truly the only way to recognize a traditional name. At that time, I said it's going to take a while for this to happen because there are multiple things that need to happen. One of the first things that we need to do is to develop a transliteration guide which will allow us to work with other jurisdictions like the federal government so that we can use our traditional font and our traditional names and have them used on things like passports, documents, and other things outside of our jurisdiction, outside of our responsibility.

Mr. Speaker, one of the biggest challenges of doing this work, and it's the right thing and we need to do it, is not producing documents with Aboriginal or traditional fonts, but it's actually the systems that we use, things like EMR, things like PeopleSoft, things like student financial assistant systems, our database systems that track information and allow people to get registered for health procedures and education, these types of things. Every one of those systems will need to be updated to recognize the traditional fonts in the Northwest Territories. Health and Social Services alone has over 40 systems that will have to be upgraded to recognized traditional fonts, and, across the government, over 400 systems will need to be updated to recognize traditional fonts. This is an incredibly expensive undertaking. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be done because personally I believe it should be done, but we need to make sure that we do it right and we get it right. We are making progress. The transliteration guide is under development. ECE has taken the lead on that. They have pulled together language experts to help them with that work. They are hoping to have the draft transliteration guide done in 2019, at which point we can present it to the federal government, and then we will begin the negotiations about trying to make sure that they can accept it and use it, so that we can pursue other documents. So it's still under work. We are still making progress. It is going to take a bit of time to realize this important commitment. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.