I'd like to give you an example of what happened in the 1950s in the Canadian Arctic. The Canadian government had a policy of trying to make Inuit into farmers. I'm not sure you're aware of this, but there were a whole lot of sheep and chickens brought up north, and we had some Inuit who tended to these chickens and sheep. There must have been some pigs too.
This happened in many of the communities—not all of the communities, but in the centres that were becoming major centres. We have a person still alive in Kuujjuaq whose name is Chicken Sam. That's not because he shies away from fights, but because he tended to those chickens. I'm bringing this up just to highlight the point that the Canadian government tried to bring into the Arctic—how would I say it?—an outside economy.
Going to your question, I think the land-based economy should be given more support. The people's ability to go hunting.... By the way, we pay taxes. We probably pay even more taxes than anybody else, because there's an extra transport cost on the groceries that come up north, and there are taxes levied on the transport costs too.
To go hunting—I'll give you the example of the snowmobile—is very expensive, as you probably know, but an elder or an Inuk hunter requires that machine to go hunting to provide food for the family. If at all possible, we'd like to see taxes not being charged on snowmobiles, for example, for the north, because they are a big contributor to the local Inuit economy. They provide a lot of food for the families. That's one point.