Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question this afternoon is for Mr. Dent in his capacity as Government House Leader and it follows on my statement about the equal pay settlement that our government signed more than two years ago now. The settlement, Mr. Speaker, set out a deadline of the end of December this year for application by employees who feel they may be eligible. Among its many provisions, the settlement recognized affected unionized employees and obliged this government to try to contact them. I would like to ask the Government House Leader how successful has the government been in...

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. In 1989, the Public Service Alliance of Canada filed an equal pay or work of equal value complaint against the Government of the Northwest Territories. The complaint alleged that the government had broken the Canadian Human Rights Act by paying men more than women in similar jobs. In June of 2002, three years later, this government, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, and the Canadian Human Rights Commission agreed on a deal for GNWT unionized employees regarding equal pay for work of equal value; an historic settlement, Mr. Speaker. It recognized that both former...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Of course, I would welcome that information. I would like to ask further though, the corporation undertook at a considerable urgency and expense to put these units on site. Did it really know which communities required these units and whether the intended audience was indeed going to be satisfied with the services? Did the Housing Corporation really do its homework before engaging in this program? Thank you.

That’s okay; we get each other's mail all the time. It’s okay, Madam Chair.

Mr. Speaker, in news reports last week there was indication that the mine has missed some critical deadlines in this process. I won’t go into the detail here, of course, but I would like to ask the Minister if our government is taking any notice of this and what pressures are we bringing to bear on either the process, or DIAND or the company to comply with rules that really have already been in place? Thank you.

Thank you. The area that concerns me the most of this whole project, Mr. Chairman, has already been flagged by Ms. Lee, and that is the mention in the bill of an airport user fee of $6.6 million out of the total $11.2 million that will be somehow assessed and collected. Six-point-six million dollars is an extraordinary amount of money to assess on the, I think, relatively small number of users for this airport. I recall in some briefings, Mr. Chairman, that we were told Yellowknife is actually a very busy airport compared to others in Canada for the number of passenger movements. That may well...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Are we going into this with a bottom line of some kind? The Minister has indicated that there might be a financial line there, but there are other things about the timing and the standards that will be set. Are these things also part of our negotiating approach? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll take that, but I think the criteria that I have here is I want to see that Yellowknife and the Northwest Territories is within range of the requirements that are being imposed on airports across Canada.

A couple of other areas in here have to do with the timing of this. Of course, so much of this was forced by the tragedy of 9-11, but that goes back three years now. Now we have this accelerated plan. The government was caused to approve a special warrant on June 30th, four months ago. I would like to know when did the planning and the scoping really start in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to talk this afternoon too, about cleaning up our act. It is not quite as noble as my colleagues here, but the problem that I am looking at is one that has been around for a long time. That is the legacy that is left over after 60 years of gold mining here in the Yellowknife area. That is the ongoing saga of trying to seek some kind of approval to the processes by which the Con and the Giant mines are going to be cleaned up.

Mr. Speaker, my other colleagues have spoken of this issue many times in this Assembly and in the past one. We continue to see a...

Thanks, Mr. Chairman. There are a few other areas in this thing that I will want to get into, but with the time I have left I guess I’d like to go with this CATSA deal that we got struck with in Yellowknife. It doesn’t seem appropriate that they can be totally arbitrary about what we get and what we don’t get. I mean, every airport in Canada must be in some certain kind of circumstance. If Yellowknife’s situation was such that putting in the explosive system required a huge amount of extra work, can’t there have been some kind of allowance or provision made for that? Perhaps one way to...