Thank you.
I thank you all for being here. It's very helpful. We're very excited to be able to actually come and hear from northerners at home, from people on the ground, on what they really need. As the critic for the Arctic in Parliament, it's great to see you all again; I've talked to you before.
My question is just going to be about a ranking of priorities. As you know, Canada has the biggest deficit in history. I'm sure the finance minister would not give me all the things I'd like to do for the Northwest Territories. Perhaps you could help me out on what some of the priorities would be, so that we don't do the picking.
Examples that were mentioned include the road to Tuk; the Mackenzie Highway; increasing geoscience funding; the road to Bathurst Inlet; restoring federal funding to arts and culture; fixing the ineffective federal implementation of claims and self-government; affordable housing; more military in the north; resource revenue sharing; northern tourism marketing and product development, which Peter mentioned; making regulatory approvals more efficient; expanding parks like Nahanni; increasing the northern allowance; more money for climate change adaptation, which affects the north so much; increasing the food mail program; renewing the extraordinary health funding that expires soon; devolution, which the premier talked about, as did Michael; the Talston subsidy; getting small communities off hydro; land use planning; and the Mackenzie Valley pipeline.
It would be great if you could give some priorities here rather than me trying to guess. In the real world, I'll never be able to get everything that I would like to push for.