Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, today we are at a giant crossroads. It had always been my approach, and it will remain my approach for the rest of my time here, that I was elected first and foremost to serve the people of the Northwest Territories, all of them, from Fort Smith to Sachs Harbour and back again.

And I pay special attention to my constituency, which is Yellowknife Centre, which is a very diverse constituency. I have the bulk of the homeless population. There's some really fancy houses over on Matonabee, lots of apartments, apartments that are so densely populated they're bigger than any riding of the small community variety.

It's my approach that what's good for all of us is good for Yellowknife Centre. We may not see in Yellowknife Centre the immediate benefits of the Tlicho All-Season Road because it doesn't come anywhere close to Yellowknife Centre. We've got a road. But I think that we understand the principle that lifting up everybody else lifts us up too; that a rising tide does, indeed, flow to all boats. And so I feel that the best example I can give of this approach is the way we handled the pandemic.

We could have divided the money we received to manage the pandemic into 33 communities, or into 19 constituencies, and we could have said when that money was gone I'm very sorry, it's gone. But no. We decided that we needed to approach the pandemic on a collective basis. So if there was a big outbreak in Fort Good Hope, we threw everything we had at it. If there was a big outbreak in Inuvik, then we threw everything we had at it. We didn't start charging back people based on the per capita population of those who needed testing, needed vaccines, needed the treatment, needed hospitalization, the use of ventilators and so on. No. This is not how health works.

Health is a collective undertaking that provides service to everyone regardless of where they live. And the medical travel, the specialists who work at telehealth where people can call in and get advice from their small community health centres, that is the collective approach that we take in health.

It pains me enormously that this is not something that is supported by people I'm frankly surprised who don't support it, that they're parochial self-interest is preeminent and that the collective interest is secondary. It's frustrating. But it is what it is. And I would like to say nothing about consensus government. I think it is completely misunderstood.

If you think this budgeting process is hard, I invite you to look at party politics. You see it on the day it's produced and then that's -- that's that. There is no opportunity to go through weeks of negotiations to increase the budget in areas that are important to nonexecutive council members.

I want to thank, in particular, the Minister of Finance. The amount of patience that she's shown in this process, and leadership, is extraordinary. And I commend her for that, along with my Cabinet colleagues, as we've sat through hours of discussion about what the budget would be and once it was tabled, what it could become. I'm very sorry that we are at this point now but this is the point that we're at. We have one more to do. Let's hope it works. Thank you.