Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I do have some general comments, and I'm going to start just by saying that I was quite surprised to see that this supplemental appropriation was specific to ECE and did not include Finance and ITI. Just from -- I'm currently sitting here in session today from the city of Edmonton, which has gone above and beyond to try to support residents, and I have to say a huge shout out to city councillors as well that have been working closely with MLAs, to try and help out people as best they can. But right now where I sit, a lot of residents have paid out of pocket for commercial airfare to get here and some of those dollars that they paid for to get here were from their mortgage and rent dollars. Some people car shared and with the current subsidies that are being provided by the GNWT, only the driver is eligible to get the dollars, and so that means that some people car shared, paid out of pocket for gas and aren't eligible to get any kind of subsidies from the GNWT. Some people ended up paying for hotels for days here down in Alberta because they were unable to get through the lineups with the Red Cross to access hotels or didn't have a means of leaving the city where it was longer for people to get hotels. And I spoke with one mother who had four young kids and was sleeping in a vehicle instead of an evacuation centre because she just didn't feel that that was a good option for her for sleeping with her children and that she would get more sleep in her vehicle. Some people are having to take taxis to the Expo Centre here in Edmonton to get food for their families because they're not comfortable in a big city using public transportation, even though the city of Edmonton has graciously made that complementary. Some people have never left the Northwest Territories before, and so it's really quite intimidating to use such a large public infrastructure to try and get around. Some people are travelling for most of the day just back and forth to the Expo Centre to try and get food and have had to kind of use out-of-pocket dollars to access some of that and are really feeling the pinch.

So from there I also just wanted to kind -- and I'm using this time, Madam Chair, to talk about this because there isn't a space in this supplementary appropriation for Finance or ITI, and so I'm unable to kind of talk about it outside of this, this space right here. But my other concern is that I have a lot of constituents who have not seen a disruption to their income but given all of these additional costs that are out-of-pocket and given that a lot of people in our territory live paycheque to paycheque, the additional costs of this evacuation are really stretching them beyond their limits and they're not sure how they're going to really put themselves back together. And I know that one of the things that we often hear said is that people need to plan for a rainy day, but a lot of people have just started to recover post-COVID. And when I think of, like, our neighbours to the south of us over in Hay River, they've been hit with rainy day after rainy day after rainy day, and there's not been an opportunity between any of their evacuations to kind of save for that rainy day. And especially when you're living paycheque to paycheque, there's no money to put away for a rainy day; the North is an expensive place to live. And so I am very concerned about, especially the residents from Hay River, who are -- I don't know how they've even begun to catch their breath. I'm concerned for the residents that I serve as to how they're going to weather this, especially where we do not know what the timeline on this is, and so I have questions too at a later date about whether or not there is room to extend these subsidies and be a lot more simple and flexible and provide them to every resident; as to whether or not if this evacuation continues, if we're going to look at additional subsidies; and that doesn't even touch on our entrepreneurs and our business owners that we very much seem we rely on in the territory with all of the work that they have done to fire smart the territory.

I'm very appreciative that the SEED funding was opened up, but I have businesses who have paid out-of-pocket without billable hours. They have paid salaries to their workers to keep them going, and they're not getting any billable hours. They're sitting down here, they are bankrupting their businesses in order to keep food on the tables and in the mouths of the workers that they have because at the end of the day, the longevity of their business, like, there's -- they're good people, which is why they're doing it, but the longevity of their business also relies on them affording their workers to come home and to stay in the territory and to keep building the territory with them. And so I just wanted to point those out there that I really would have liked to have seen some Finance and ITI dollars in this supplementary appropriation so we could discuss some of those items as well. And I'll have more specific questions for ECE when we get to the appropriate time in the budget. But I have a lot of concerns right now about our residents wearing this evacuation and weathering this very big storm. Thank you, Madam Chair.