Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning to all my colleagues here. It’s nice to listen that a lot of our initiatives and issues in our regions across the territory are very similar. Housing seems to be a big one. I’m going to start off with that.
Housing in Nunakput in some of the smaller communities, the situation that some people face is a reality that there are a lot of homeless people. A lot of these homeless people are in their twenties and early thirties. That generation group is suffering from mental well-being; in fact, so much so that they cannot focus on their children’s lives, their education, a lot of them are not graduating from high school, and so this group of young people are not being employed on projects around the region. In fact it gets worse than that; a lot of them recycle in and out of jail and this is a huge issue. To house someone in jail is very costly, but to set out programs and initiatives would alleviate that and would bring more sense of pride to the community.
There are many homeless people and there is a lot of overcrowding, and that means not just the grandparents, there are three generations of people in one house and that is a lot. We’ve seen single dwellings, multi-dwellings, initiatives and programs, but we need to think outside the box, as many of you say, and put more money into housing and put more homes in our communities. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but to restructure that gives us an opportunity. There are so many bright people in this room and this gives us a fair chance. I look at this as one big project. Every project is finite, there is a beginning and an end, so we have four years to make sure that these programs run as best they can, and with the capacity in this room I think we can give it a really good shot and start off with the right foot.
Education and employment is another big one in our communities. Starting from preschool, a lot of kids going into kindergarten, I wouldn’t say a lot, but a small percentage do know their ABCs, and to children who don’t know their ABCs and are catching up to the rest are not going to have a good start in school and are going to struggle all the way through. We need to focus on early childhood development. It costs money, but in the end you are doing preventive maintenance; you are ensuring that the kids get the quality education that they deserve going up through high school. As well, from K-12 we need to focus on the culture. Like Jackson says, we need to focus on a cultural-based education as well. If our children are having identity loss issues, then they are not going to focus so much on their education, they are not going to be included in the projects that they should be included in for their age groups, so we need to focus on having culture, having more harvesting camps and cultural practices within our schools. My region is predominantly Inuvialuit, so we are focusing on travel to some of the communities. I see in Ulukhaktok there is a very strong education system there, and I think we need to utilize that as setting standards for our education system in the North in the smaller communities. I would encourage all the new Cabinet to travel up to our communities and see the differences between the worst possible case and the best system that is working, then you will know what to do coming back in this next Legislative Assembly. For me that is very important, so as soon as we form Cabinet, I am going to invite the Ministers up to my region to do a tour and work closely with the people and see the situation right from the housing, education and employment, as well as the impacts of climate change.
Back to education and employment. Now that we have people graduating from high school, people going into university or college, we need to support them in more ways than one. I have some complaints of some residents who have gone away to attend school and they have lost their home coming back. So, coming back, they come back to nothing. They start from zero again and we cannot put our residents through this any longer. We will need to look at the processes of that for housing and education. All of these departments align and work together, so we need to focus on that, we need to be accommodating to college students. By accommodating them, we will retain as many students and prospective employees with the GNWT. No matter what they have trained in, the goal is to retain as many as possible. I saw the last report. There was a lot of money being spent on training and education, and we need to focus on retaining the expertise in the territory. Although you cannot tell people where to go and what to do,, people simply make life choices, and we need to understand that and focus on that as well. So, to draw the line, there’s a very fine line. Sometimes we don’t know if we’re walking on the other side, but we need to promote education, culture and employment, and very, very much so.
Also, moving forward to employment, I see there are a lot of Aboriginal people working within the GNWT. We need to mentor more Aboriginal educated people into positions of deputy ministers. I see a lot of MLAs here that are Aboriginal people. Kudos to you, but we need to focus on mentoring programs, as well, to retain our employees and bring back a sense of pride to the communities that they come from.
Climate change. Talking about climate change, I was in Tuktoyaktuk and I’ve seen some of the effects of it, the shoreline erosion along the coast on the west side of the community. We’re going to have to develop a plan very, very soon. The plans that they have in place need to be looked at, reassessed and implemented as soon as we can. There are some homes that will probably hit the shore in the next couple of years. That being said, the shoreline erosion is happening more and more. The permafrost melting, that community is being affected the most. The cost of the infrastructure due to climate change is going to be really, really big.
We are the thermostat of everything that’s going on due to climate change. A lot of my colleagues were in Paris for the COP21 coming back with an action plan. We need to utilize that as well as all the federal government initiatives that are coming out. We need to be proactive and look at these opportunities for our regions. That means a lot of work and building your team. Thursday we’ll have a team and we know where to start. I think it’s important for us to work together no matter what, no matter where. If we disagree, climate change is going to have a huge impact on all of our communities.
Moving forward to food security. Food security in the coastal communities is at the forefront of the changes. In recent years food security has increasingly become a topic of a conversation that is gaining more and more attention worldwide. What does food security mean to those that call the Arctic home? Food security is more than calories, more than nutrients; it’s the entire Arctic eco-system and the relationships between all components within. It’s about how our cultures teach us when, where, how to obtain, process, store and consume the food that we harvest on the land. We need to focus on that as well as including our indigenous knowledge and how it will aid in eliminating these changes we are facing on climate change. Climate change for me is a big issue. I see it in my community. It definitely has an impact on how we harvest.
Moving forward from there, we need to focus on our hunters and trappers that hunt and trap in the Northwest Territories. We need to tie this into cultural education as well. Our hunters’ hunting and trapping system is the best in the world. We need to promote that more and more, showcase it. It gives our families and our communities a sense of pride, and that’s the easiest program to manage moving forward. The resources are not always just underground, they’re walking on the land. The hunting and trapping aspects along the coast, we need to look at that as an industry itself, too, and harvesting on Banks Island. There are thousands and thousands of muskox we can look at, too, as a source of food and a source of an economy for the North during these hard times.
A lot of colleagues mentioned the Mackenzie Valley Highway. Starting the process on that will help with the struggling economy with the closure of mines. Down the road there will be more mines that close, so we’re going to face more and more hardships in the time to come. So, I think we need to focus on the aspect of that. The Inuvik-Tuk Highway is a good example. There are a lot of Aboriginal people from all over Canada working on that project, and we need to learn from the mistakes and also improve our strong points on that project to hire and educate our people from our region. We need to utilize more resources into that project from the Northwest Territories.
Moving forward, I want to talk about the leadership that we have coming into this new Legislature. This is for a lot of us our first time, and I believe that we have the capacity to make a lot of changes to this government for the betterment of our communities and our territory. Once we start to put our teams together and work on projects, we need to keep in mind that we are only people and we are only here for four years. I look forward to working with everybody in our region, my communities, the four communities. It doesn’t mean I just represent those four; I am working with the whole Northwest Territories.
In closing, I am happy to be of assistance to anyone and everyone in this room and beyond on the projects that we are looking forward to over the next four years. Thank you, Mr. Chair.