Thank you. Thank you very much for having me here today. I would like to thank the residents of Great Slave for electing me and putting their faith in me for the next four years.
I first wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the efforts of several groups and several individuals who have made it possible for myself to be here today, particularly the Status of Women, my predecessors who have gone ahead of me, who made sure that there was encouragement and workshops and words of advice so that those of us who were considering this as an option pulled the trigger and made the decision to run. I wouldn't be here without any of them, and they need to know that this just didn't happen overnight. It was the culmination of years and years of efforts and hard work by many individuals. I also want to thank the allies, the males who supported us in getting us here.
There is nothing like putting us on the spot, day two, to be televised for my first-ever speech to be made in the House, so I will say I am a little bit nervous. You will have to forgive me for that.
Obviously, while I ran, one of the major planks of my platform was the economy. That is not to say that I don't believe that social issues and other issues that are facing the GNWT are important. However, that being said, if we don't have any money to pay for anything, we aren't going to be going anywhere as a territory.
We all know the diamond mines are set to close within the next decade, and we need to work our best to expand the life of those mines to ensure that we continue to have an economy to work on while we build our sustainable diverse economy parallel to the diamond mining or the resource extraction industry. We need to stimulate our exploration sector by the completion of key infrastructure projects. For me, that includes the Slave Geologic corridor, the Taltson hydro expansion, the Mackenzie Valley Highway.
As we see climate change and climate uncertainty going forward, we are going to leave our communities stranded. If we don't start to build our all-weather road system and increase the reliability of our transportation system, we are going to be in trouble. I know there is a huge amount of security that comes from the ability to decide that you are allowed to leave. When that cost of leaving is $2,000 to fly out, you are going to be in trouble.
I understand that roads can create issues. There is definitely an environmental impact for things like these infrastructure projects that I would like to be done. However, that being said, we can do work and we can build infrastructure in a sustainable manner, and we can do it with the best and highest of environmental standards and regulations. We have a great environmental regulatory system in Canada and in the Northwest Territories, so it is not realistic to say that we are not going to build anything going forward.
Our economy has been based on mining in the past, and it is what is continuing to feed our families at the moment. I would love to see more of an expansion of tourism. However, tourism jobs don't pay the same as mining jobs. At the end of the day, nobody wants to come back from a service job at the mine where they are making $30 to $40 an hour to work at a hotel in Yellowknife for $14. This is a reality. I think this is something we have to face.
Another area where I think we need to be looking, as our mining sector is declining, is we need to be looking at our remediation reclamation sector. We need to be lobbying the federal government to ensure that the jobs that were recreated by the Giant Mine Remediation Project are staying in the Northwest Territories. Most of that work is being done by southern companies. As the construction management contractor said, no one up here has the capability of doing it. Well, my understanding was, five years ago, that job or that project was to create northern capacity and capabilities. To throw our hands up now and say that is not possible, I don't think it is fair. It is a billion-dollar cleanup. Why aren't we getting more of that pie?
Another area I would really like to see expansion or see development in the next four to 10 years is the Polytechnic University. I am not going to sit here and say it should be a revamping of Aurora College. I have no idea in that area, and I would definitely want to become more informed in that. However, I do think that we have amazing permafrost scientists. We have amazing engineers. We have amazing geologists in the North. We should be utilizing those people, that talent, and leading the way in climate change research and permafrost science.
Yukon College is already in the process of transitioning to a university, so we need to be in the forefront of that education sector. We also need to be creating this northern infrastructure, so we are a player in the Arctic economy. Both Nunavut and the Yukon are booming. Both of them are set to have population increases. I believe Iqaluit is going to double in the next 10 years. They are building roads. They are building mines. They are building a road down into (inaudible). We need to build our roads to connect to that, because eventually there are going to be ports in the Arctic Ocean. If we can access those ports, that is going to help grow our economy a lot better.
One of the things that is also affecting our economy in the North is the uncertainty of the Northwest Territories. A huge factor in that is the unsettled land claims. It has also been the conduct of our government, as well. We are not seen to be a stable, reliable place to invest money. If they can go elsewhere where they don't have the cost of doing business like they do here, plus the uncertainty of not knowing where we are going to be in the next five years, we would have more investment in the North.
To do so, we do need to offer better infrastructure so that the mines can do business at a cheaper rate. I am not sure about the taxation issues that my colleague brought up, and I definitely need to think that we need to ensure that the mines are paying their fair share as they extract our resources and ensuring that those jobs do stay in the North for Northerners. However, I don't think it is realistic to say we aren't going to be mining in the next 10 to 20 years. We just need to ensure we are doing it right.
I have worked a lot in contaminated sites. I have worked at Giant Mine. I believe I have had some health issues as a result of working at Giant Mine. If there is anybody who does see the impacts of mining gone wrong, it is myself, and that is one of the reasons I am happy to be here, is because I do feel like I can offer that lens on what needs to be done so that we are doing it in the right manner.
As I went door-to-door, one of the key huge things for me, and it is not an area I was super exposed to in my profession, was the social issues facing Yellowknife, obviously, and as in the north as a Yellowknife-centric. Obviously, as I travelled around to different communities, I see the poverty. We are a very, very "have" and "have not" territory, and this is really disturbing to me.
One of the things that I did hear at the door a lot of times, and not to diss the residents of Great Slave, however, there is a sense of disconnect, I think, between people in Yellowknife and what is actually happening in the rest of the territory. I would like to work hard to be a bridge towards showing the communities that we are not going to be a Yellowknife-centric government, that we are going to take care of everybody, because we are only as strong as our weakest community, and if we are having the issues that we are having in places outside of Yellowknife, then that hurts Yellowknife, as well. It is all a drain on our system, so we need to ensure that every person within the territory is healthy, that every person has the same opportunity to move forward.
Education is a big one. As engineers, we often talk: how do we get more northern and Aboriginal students to take engineering? The answer is: we don't know. We look at the education system, and I can't even fathom how a child from a community would make it into an engineering program somewhere in the south. That is another reason why I do think the polytechnic is a good way for us to go and continuing along with the trades programs that we already have and keeping those strong.
However, if we can have a program or something within the North that allows northern students to have that bridge where it makes it a lot easier for them to go to school where they are not all of a sudden -- I found myself as a child going and seeing Vancouver to go to university overwhelming, and I came from a city of about 130,000 people in the south. So for me to go to a big city was overwhelming. I cannot even imagine what it would be like to be a child from a community trying to go to Calgary or Vancouver for the first time at the age of 18. We are setting them up for failure. We have a two-tier system there, it appears to me. Again, it is not something that I would profess to have huge amounts of knowledge on; however, I think it is something that really does need to be addressed. We are failing a lot of people in our territory.
That being said, I think we have a lot of challenges ahead of us. As I went door-to-door, I recognized how little I actually know and how much I have to learn in order to do this job better. I am grateful for my colleagues here because I feel like already, even in one day, they have taught me a lot, and I know that I am going to continue to learn from all of you and grow. I already can feel that we have a collaborative group of people here. I truly believe we are all here for the right reasons. We all want to see things move forward in this territory. We have been spinning our wheels, and I think that it is time for that to stop, and I am looking forward to being part of the solution. Thank you very much.