Thank you, Madam Chair. The last 13 years of my life, I have been a woman in a non-traditional role, and I now am in charge of a department that is full of those exact people. That is the profession that I have been trying to change, myself, personally, for many years, so I am well aware of that. Unfortunately, a lot of these technical positions are traditionally male-dominated positions. We have problems with getting Indigenous people into sciences, and it's not from a lack of capacity or ability. It is a lack of our education system. This is all the conversation we are having around, and I am not trying to throw the ECE Minister under the bus. We are all new. I do not hold him responsible for that.
However, this is a problem that is very systemic to the Northwest Territories and a conversation that I have had since the first day I got up here: if we want to have a successful North, we need to have Northerners making the decisions and doing the work, and that includes in the technical and the skilled sets, too, not just the labour. All I can say is, again, this is a huge, I don't want to call it a pet, but it's a huge focus of me and why I'm sitting in this seat, and I can tell you that those guys sitting over there are going to be hearing it for the next three years about getting rid of that old boy's club and changing that mentality. Sorry, Joe. All I can say is commit to you that it is going to be ongoing. I will actually task the department right now re: coming back to the Member with what are they doing to increase diversification in the department. Let's make it more politically correct. Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
