Thank you, Mr. Clerk. I want to start by acknowledging that I'm on Chief Drygeese territory, and I'm honoured to be here. I am also proud to represent Yellowknife Centre. I am here as the voice for a very diverse community downtown that has a diversity of issues and a diversity of incomes.

My vision is to provide people with the tools to realize their full potential, and I am going to go through what some of those tools are, starting with the economy. The very best thing we can do for ourselves to start with is it settle land rights negotiations and self-government negotiations. There is a way forward, using the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. This Assembly has recognized and supported that declaration, but the next step is to implement it and make it meaningful in our land rights negotiations and line up our position with the federal position and with the position of the Indigenous government organizations.

I really feel that not just adopting but implementing UNDRIP, as it's called, will provide Indigenous government organizations with control over their land and their government, for development or conservation purposes, but in any case it would provide land certainty. The result of that would be good for the Northwest Territories, and it would be good for our primary industry, which is mining; and it is my hope that mining continues to be our primary industry, to the extent that we have any control over it.

I recognize that commodity markets are not within our control. Attracting investment is not within our control, and we can see that with the fact that we have two mines that are fully permitted that are not being built because either the commodity prices are too low or they can't attract the investment.

There are ways for us to assist in exploration, specifically through the Mining Incentive Program. That program returns $5 for every dollar invested, and the government could certainly do more by putting money into that.

We also need to take a better look at diversification. I talked about this in my last speech, but the need for it is even greater now than it was before, and there are three areas that I've talked about consistently here. The first is tourism. Tourism has been a very successful industry in Yellowknife and in the Northwest Territories generally, and it is time for us to share the infrastructure dollars that we're currently putting into roads with tourism. We need a visitor centre here in Yellowknife. We need more campgrounds and more parks for road traffic to visit. We need more money into product diversification so that the tourists who come here spend more time here and spend more money. Tourism, I know, doesn't pay like the mines, but it is still a growing segment of our economy and it needs more investment.

The second area with many benefits is retrofits. If we could retrofit public housing, private housing, commercial office space, we would derive three kinds of benefits; jobs, a reduction in greenhouse gas emission, and a reduction in utility bills. There are studies that have been done that give a lot of detail about the return on investment; it's impressive and it's necessary, and we need to look at it very seriously. It addresses a number of issues that are important to all of us.

The third area, which is an economic area but also obviously a social development area, is childcare. Childcare is another area in which there are three distinct benefits. The first is jobs; the second is enabling parents to go back to the workforce after they finish their parental leave; and the third is the development of the children themselves so that they are ready for school when they enter junior kindergarten.

An investment in childcare is essential, and it's worth noting again that 11 of 33 communities in the NWT don't have licensed childcare. This is an essential priority. It also requires infrastructure investment. The biggest barrier to providing more childcare spaces in the NWT is having the appropriate space to host that childcare, and what we learned last time was that the regulations are very stiff in this area. I appreciate the reason for it, but it makes it out of reach for non-profits to build these childcare spaces, and so we need infrastructure investment, and I believe that our best option for that is to build childcare spaces in schools, because that is one place where all children will be, from the time they start childcare until the time that they graduate or move into a higher-level school. So the infrastructure investment in childcare is a must.

The next area I heard a lot about again this time, as I did last time, was the cost of living. Power bills are very high in Yellowknife. Yellowknife subsidizes electricity rates for the rest of the NWT, and people find them onerous. They end up being one of the largest household bills that they have. We need to come to terms with the cost of our power, whether that's investing in clean energy, subsidizing power rates, finding more customers. We have to come to terms with not only the price of it, but the fact that the infrastructure for the Northwest Territories Power Corporation is aging and will need a major investment of replacement in the near future. Some of this burden could be taken on by the development of Taltson, but I don't see that happening soon. That's a very long-term project, with distinct risks of its own.

The third area that's very important to me is services for seniors. In the last Assembly, not one new unit of senior's housing was built in Yellowknife. That's in spite of the fact that 134 seniors' households are added to our population every single year. So what we end up with is a six-year waiting list at Avens, and more than a quarter of the public housing waiting list, which is an astonishing 330 households, more than a quarter of that list is seniors. We also have seniors in emergency shelters. We need housing for seniors. We also need a bigger budget for retrofitting housing for seniors so that they can stay in their own homes, if they are able to do so. Right now, the budget for the entire NWT is barely adequate for a small community, let alone for 33 communities.

We also need to invest in homecare for seniors. The longer they can stay in their own homes, usually the happier they are, and the less money they cost the public purse. So I am anxiously awaiting the results of the homecare study that was commissioned in the last Assembly and should be delivered soon.

A third area for seniors is the day program. There was a day program until three years ago. It was closed because the service provider, Avens, decided that it was too risky a program, given the diversity of needs of the people within it, but there has never been a replacement for this program. The result of that is that social inclusion needs of elders are not being met, and at the same time respite needs of families who are caring for these elders are not being met, either. So this is an absolute essential. We need a day program in Yellowknife.

I want to talk a little bit also about children. I've talked about the importance of early childhood development, and I had this in my speech last time, as well. The very best investment we can make is in children ages zero to three. If they get a good start at that age, they will be set up to succeed at school, from the time they begin through until the end. When we don't make that investment, we short-change those children, and we pay for it, and they pay for it for the rest of their lives. It's just not fair. We must do better.

The other area under the heading of children is improvements of services for children in care. We all heard Auditor General had to say about services provided. They are inadequate at the very least and in some cases harmful, so there is a quality improvement plan in place, but we have to make sure that the social work positions are adequately staffed throughout the Northwest Territories so that services to children in care are improved.

One of the other areas under the heading of children is food security. Most of the NWT residents who experienced moderate or severe food insecurity are children, and they depend on feeding programs at school. They depend on their parents going to food banks. It is not acceptable. There needs to be a comprehensive food security strategy in the next Assembly that deals with the question of how to keep people from experiencing hunger or making trade-offs about the quality and quantity of food that they are consuming. This is absolutely essential. We have 20 percent of our territorial population who are experiencing food insecurity.

The next area is income assistance reform. There have been some changes to income assistance, which are useful, but it is still a payroll program. It is still a very punitive program, where people are trapped in their monthly allotment, being asked to provide information about what they earned and what they spent. What we need is to pile up the basic income guarantee where we pick a number of different communities of different sizes and in different locations and give people a monthly amount of money to live on and see whether they are able to make that work to get themselves and their families out of poverty, rather than having them on the payroll system.

The next area is education. The system simply is not delivering the results that we want in terms of the quantity and quality of high school graduates. We have money now for Jordan's Principle, but that money is not guaranteed into the future. It needs to be guaranteed, so that children with disabilities have the help they need to succeed.

We also need to revisit the funding for education to ensure that schools that have heavy numbers of children who need extra support in fact have the money to provide that support.

I am a supporter of post-secondary education and of the revamped Aurora College, or the creation of the new polytechnic, whichever way you look at it. This is something that we really must do.

In the area of health, I heard lots from my constituents about problems with the start-up of the hospital. We have some real quality control issues there, to do with a number of different areas. I don't think they are unique to our hospital start-up, but we need to pay attention to them because they are having a negative impact on the people who are in hospital trying to recover from their illnesses and injuries, and they are in a situation where the care is compromised by the physical structure.

The other thing to do with health generally, and the hospital in particular, is that it is a Cadillac facility being run on a shoestring in terms of staffing because of the shortage of nursing and other health professionals. We need a strategy to attract and retain nurses to this territory so that we can do better with healthcare.

The last area I want to talk about is the one that is probably most important to my constituents other than the economy, and that is the situation in downtown Yellowknife. The homeless and intoxicated population in downtown Yellowknife are from all across the territory. They are not just people in Yellowknife on hard times. They are people from all of your communities who have come here for different reasons, and they have stayed here. Maybe your community is dry, and they can drink here. Maybe they were in jail, and they stayed here when they got out. Maybe they were in hospital, and they stayed here when they got out. The situation is that we now have a large population of people who have chronic addictions and chronic homelessness, not always both together but with a variety of both of those problems. They need housing, and they need programming.

There was an evaluation of the combined day shelter and sobering centre. That was completed this year, and it has 11 specific short-term recommendations about how services at the sobering centre and day shelter could be improved. We need to bring the city and the contractor on board to implement those recommendations so that we can improve services to people on the street and we can assist people in feeling safe downtown. That was something I heard very often. People do not feel safe. They are intimidated by the intoxicated population, and it is on us to help those people feel safe downtown whenever they happen to be there.

The depressing thing about my list is it is very much like the list I gave four years ago. That doesn't mean that nothing happened. It means that not enough happened, and once again we are in a changed mandate situation. Eleven new MLAs last time, 12 new MLAs this time. We can't fool around anymore. These chronic issues that we have all mentioned, intoxication, homelessness, poor education results, these are ongoing issues that we really have to drill down on this time and not make an incremental change, but make a really significant change. Thank you.