Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and thank you, Madam Chair.
Just in regard to what my mayor brings forward, we're resource-rich and cash-poor. That's where we are now in my home community of Tuktoyaktuk.
I'm a former Speaker of the Northwest Territories and a former MLA. For the last three years, I've seen it getting worse and worse in regard to our relying too much on government handouts. The stuff that we are getting is not enough to do anything with.
The biggest thing we have to do is try to work together to make Tuk a deep-sea port, doing it privately with another country, and that's the way it's looking right now. We've had the Chinese—the CCCC, the harbour company out of China—come in to look at Tuk harbour, looking at a deep-sea port.
As my mayor said, we have 33 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and yet we bring it from Delta, B.C., which is clogging up our highways right through the Yukon, coming all the way up through the Yukon and doing a 48-hour shot from Delta to bring it up. How dangerous is that?
It's not only safety. As my mayor said, we're a proud people. We want to do it ourselves and we are going to get it done, with or without any assistance. We're working toward that. We want to make sure that my Inuvialuit people, my people of Tuk and all my youth, are taken care of because they are the lost ones.
Everyone has to graduate and leave town. Two of my kids are living in the Yukon. No jobs.... That's one thing you guys have to think about.
It's so easy to sit down here and make judgments on people and lives that are 3,500 klicks away, and make decisions on our behalf, especially with that moratorium on the Beaufort. That should be taken away, lifted, please and thank you. That is going to open up and give jobs to our people—training and all the stuff we're wishing for.
Our territorial government is not coming up to the plate right now.
Thank you for listening, and I look forward to any questions.