Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thank you to my colleague. I had written in the chat that I did want to speak to this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I have spent the time since I left Yellowknife late Thursday evening dealing with numerous uncountable emails and messages and phone calls from people who have been evacuating and leaving the North. Many of these people are Indigenous. They have been reaching out to me. And in my time spent since this has started, I have become aware that there were no conversations with Indigenous governments ahead of all of this evacuation. No opportunity for Indigenous governments to bring their people home, no supports to bring them home. The people in Behchoko do not have food right now, which is part of the reason I chose to leave the community. Everybody is relying on a Northern store that has no supplies, that's getting a truck every now and then, and people are not being allowed into Yellowknife to do their shopping, including the elders home.

When I see all of this happening and I listen and see within the community the ability to have taken care of their own people, I wonder why they were not consulted by this Cabinet who talks a lot about their Indigenous relationships but when push came to shove, there was no conversation as all of the public service left Yellowknife and put a bunch of people on planes. And when I stood in that line -- around that lineup at Sir John, I did not see the higher level senior management public servants standing there. In fact, I know most of them left before the order even was made public or told to us as MLAs.

As this all has progressed, I have become aware of 50 to 70 homeless people that were dropped off at evacuation centres in the south, mostly Indigenous. One has OD'd and perhaps will probably die here in the next while. There has been a death of a person from Fort Smith that's been evacuated. And there has been a person badly burnt in the evacuation of Hay River that was then hit by a car due to the mass panic of people leaving the territory. So when I look at all of this and I look at the capabilities of our communities and I hear our Premier say that other communities and other MLAs --