Qujannamiik. Thank you for that question, and thanks to Ms. May for facilitating some of it.
First of all, thank you for your condolences. I think Mr. Pearson has left his mark with the people. It is a very sad and happy day for us, happy for him and sad for us.
It's really difficult. When we say “proportional”, is that something that you guarantee has to be Inuk? For example, in Nunavut, to run for office, we're really happy that Hunter is Inuk, but some years it wasn't an Inuk, and so it was difficult.
I was really encouraged to hear that you are looking at some of the barriers to representation. I commented about women having a different world view, and they face the glass ceiling corporate-wise and politically. In Nunavut, the majority of the breadwinners are now women, and they're single mothers. How do we equip them to help us address some of the day-to-day challenges they face in trying to put food on the table? How can we use the tools that government has in their hands to make it better for the people who live here?
That's often the challenge, I think. That's why Nunavut took seriously the idea of two forms, with the male and the female in representation, because we thought that in our world Inuit women see the world differently from the men who were predominantly in authority positions, but now it's women that are really disproportionately represented. They are the ones who are carrying the weight of the families in Nunavut.