Marsi cho, Madam Speaker. I will not say too much beyond what some of my colleagues have already spoken about this motion. I will say, when this news first came up, the news reports in China last year about this terrible virus, COVID-19, I thought, "I hope it doesn't come this way." All of a sudden, you start hearing that kind of trickle starting to come through and the terrible sickness and illness. Again, every day, I was thinking, "I just hope it does not come this way," and sure enough, it did. It did make its way here. We started to hear businesses closed, businesses that had kept open for 200 years all of a sudden start closing their doors, that there is operations in place, businesses, like all kinds of, again, businesses are open during the World War II, like through the world wars, that, all of a sudden because of COVID, they are closed now. Things we've never seen in this generation, that none of us has ever experienced, and I kept thinking, "I hope it doesn't come this way." Sure enough, it did, and one of the cases hit my home town. That was scary, but we got through that. When I visit my home town, if the weather is nice enough, I'll go and visit some of my lost loved ones. I go and visit my pops at the grave, and on the way out of the graveyard in Deninu Kue, there is a large area there of a previous pandemic from the flu and TB. There are some terrible, terrible scourges that hit our territory and our people really hard, and I hope none of this ever happens again. How do we navigate that?
In really thinking about this, again, I have spoken about this early on. When I first saw the documents that came out from the Cabinet side of things, I thought it was some sort of weird joke. I thought, "It had better not be April 1st." I looked at the date, and no, this is actually happening. Because, looking at this and at our responses, we're the only jurisdiction in the country that is doing this, that is creating a department to react to this. It has never been done. It's not done anywhere else. Other jurisdictions are aligning their resources to battle this through their different departments and doing it in that way. Is this best practice? No. Do I feel this is the right thing to do? No. No, I don't feel it is.
I mentioned this yesterday, and I won't spend too much more time speaking to this. I really believe in my heart that there is a better way to go, but not this way. Like I said, we're very thankful right now. Our response right now has been very good, and I'm hoping and I'm praying that we don't see any loss of life through this. I'm hoping we navigate this, and I have to respect all my colleagues' votes. We've been here just over a year, now. We all have our mandates, and we have to try to navigate through this. I really think this $8.7 million will take a step back against some of our mandate items. I think there is a better way to do this, and so, again, I want to let everyone know that I will be speaking against this motion and voting against it. I do not support this part of the motion.
Again, like what my colleague from Deh Cho said, it's just the specific allocation for the COVID secretariat. This $8.7 million is what I have an issue with. The rest, I'm okay with. With that, I have nothing else to say. Marsi cho.