Mr. Speaker, our government has always been clear with the federal government that we must have a resource revenue sharing agreement in place before the pipeline is completed. Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister, on December 14th when we signed the framework for the Northern Strategy, committed publicly to make substantial progress in the near future on resource revenue sharing and devolution. He committed to having an agreement-in-principle done and signed this spring and I want to hold him to that. He committed to finishing off the negotiations on devolution and resource revenue sharing by 2006...

Mr. Speaker, I wish to advise Members that the Honourable Charles Dent will be absent from the House today to attend the signing of the Early Learning Childcare Agreement for federal/provincial/territorial Ministers of Social Services in Vancouver. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it was with great pleasure I received news from Ottawa yesterday that Bill C-14, the Tlicho Land Claims and Self-Government Act, had received third and final reading in the Senate and was given Royal Assent.

---Applause

Mr. Speaker, this bill is the result of over a decade of hard work by negotiators, chiefs, elders and the Tlicho people. It represents the vision held by Chief Monfwi at the signing of Treaty 11 in 1921 and sets a new standard for land claims and self-government agreements in Canada.

Yesterday's announcement was an historic one for the Tlicho...

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Deh Cho, that Bill 22, An Act to Amend the Education Act, No. 2, be read for the first time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, we support the pipeline. We need the pipeline, I believe, to have a strong economy. But our support is not unconditional. There are conditions on it in the same way with the Inuvialuit, the Gwich’in, the Sahtu, everybody is negotiating benefit and access agreements and we support them in doing that. I know their support is not unconditional. They are not going to say come and take the oil and gas, we don’t need any agreements, we don’t need any more benefits. Our position is the same as theirs. We have conditions on environment, conditions in terms of social issues, conditions...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. For starters, 70 percent of our budget of roughly $1 billion is for social programs. I don’t have a breakdown of how much of that goes to the agencies and what their priorities are and how they are going to go about achieving it. I would sure like to share that with them, as much as we have time to do it. I am sure the Ministers of the social programs will be able to give us a lot of detail, as we get into the department estimates, of where that 70 percent of the money is going. We’ve said yes and the Minister of Finance say it goes to social programs and community...

Mr. Speaker, I have been very clear on that all along and I will say it again: We cannot tolerate having zero royalties stay with this government and stay with northern people. We have to have an agreement and we have to have an agreement before the pipeline proceeds. That’s the bottom line for our government and we haven’t changed our position. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, no, we are not ready today for the pipeline. We’ve got a lot of work to do over the next 18 months/two years, however long. We’ve got a lot to do. I think it’s incumbent on all of us here and leaders outside of this Chamber, municipal leaders, aboriginal leaders, federal government, for all of us to work together to get ready. We have a short time frame. We need to get ready but, to answer the question, I would agree we are not ready today. At the same time, if someone had asked the Tlicho if they were ready to sign their agreement six months ago, they would have said no, we are...

Mr. Speaker, we have a program that provides boards with incentives. The Department of Education is reviewing that to see whether or not more incentive would make a difference. If we feel it will, then the department will proceed with increased incentives to hire northern teachers. Mr. Speaker, because these are boards and they have the authority to do their own hiring, we can’t force them, but we can provide appropriate incentives to encourage them and hopefully they will follow the spirit of what we want to do. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, we are not aware of any general issues they have with hiring northern teachers. Certainly they could have difficulty with some individual possibly, but, as a whole, there are no known reasons why any board would be finding it difficult to hire this category of teachers. Mr. Speaker, as I said, it may be individual cases that some don’t do well on interviews and so on, but I don’t think there are any overall reasons. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.