Thank you, Madam Chair. I, too, want to thank all of our staff and the committee for the hard work on this report. One of the reasons that this was an important topic to myself is that I have also had a lot of involvement with the Giant Mine for many, many years as a consultant. And, in fact, that was actually the reason that I ended up in the Northwest Territories to begin with, was to take a job with the technical adviser at Giant Mine.

As an employee of the contractor at the mine, as a consultant at the mine, later on I have watched, over the years, numerous contacts and workers from the south -- or contracts going to the south and workers coming from the south to do the work on the project. And you can imagine how disappointing it was when I once bid on the project for the construction management contract only to find out that the government, once again -- the federal government at least this time -- chose to use money as the deciding factor and went with the company that had proposed $25 million less for the project on their bid despite the fact that our project actually would have -- or our proposal would have placed Indigenous people into the leadership roles at the mine within five years.

Then, bidding on the projects at the mine as a consultant, I was then told that the Aboriginal content that I had worked very hard to incorporate into my bid was only going to be used if my technical bid was the same as another, and they needed a tie breaker. That was from the current contractor -- or construction management supervisors at the mine now. My understanding is most of them live in the south, Calgary. I'm looking at their website right now. Their head office is in Centreville, Virginia, in the US. So it's very clear to me that this project, which is billions of dollars, is just funneling money out of the North, and nobody really is benefitting that much here from it. If anything, what the people here are getting are health issues and headache and poor quality of life as a result of that, not to mention the impacts of all these southern workers coming in and taking all of our housing away and not having any ability to build their own camps. We have no market for that. So I guess I just want to say that I think this was a missed opportunity. I actually think it is way too late. I think that we've missed the boat on Giant Mine, and I'm hoping that the work that the committee has done can actually spur future work to be in the true spirit of keeping work and money and contracts in the North. Thank you.