Marsi cho, Mr. Speaker. I want to briefly address our government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We've seen a lot of good information from our Minister of Health and Social Services and the Chief Public Health Officer. They've been working really hard, lately, and I want to say thank you for that. However, I believe that is still a need for more preparatory work. My main worry right now, Mr. Speaker, is for our small communities. Many of our small communities don't have the resources, services, or capacity if the pandemic gets into the NWT.

Mr. Speaker, today we will be looking at passing our interim appropriation that is necessary to have a functioning government in these trying times. This will really test our resolve, but, as some of the other Members have mentioned, we are a really strong collection of communities and we will get through this. We are being told to practice social distancing, we need to keep our vulnerable populations in mind. We still need to be compassionate, though, and help each other out while using common sense and best practices while doing so. I recently had a constituent who had a great idea to get care packages out for our elders and those with mobility restrictions if this crisis does carry out for a longer period of time, and I thought that was a great idea.

I also want to address the issue of communications to some of our elders and those who don't use cell phones, computers, and the like, and social media, because we need to get the message out there for people in the Indigenous languages, so I'm hoping we can address that today. I know that a lot of our elders listen to community radio, CKLB, and they are really are dependent on it to get their news. Some of them are still not sure what's going on, and we need to really reach out to them and let them know that we care and we're doing something to assists them.

That being said, we are really strong as a territory, a network of communities. We've got through other scourges and other scares like this in the past, because we worked together, we communicated with each other, and this is no different. Marsi Cho, Mr. Speaker. I will have some questions for the Minister of Health and Social Services later on. Marsi cho.