Good morning, everyone. Uvlaami. First, I would like to say it is a great honour to be standing here as MLA-elect representing the riding of Inuvik Twin Lakes. I am truly grateful to the residents for selecting me to be their voice in this 19th Assembly, and I would also like thank Minister Robert C. McLeod for his numerous years representing the Inuvik Twin Lakes riding. To my colleagues here today, congratulations to you, as well. I look forward to working with you over the next four years, as we strive to work better for the lives of all of our residents.
Today, I want to share with you some of the important and repeated concerns in my riding that I heard about along the campaign period. As we go through our priority-setting process, these are important issues to the residents of the Inuvik Twin Lakes, and they are also serious concerns to me as an Inuvik Twin Lakes resident. I would like to start with the health of our residents.
Mental health and adductions. We have an increasing homeless population in our community that needs to be addressed. We need to support these residents in their healing, and sending residents who are mainly Indigenous out of the territory is not the answer. We need to have local, community, regional, and territorial programs where we involve our Indigenous partners to aid in this creation. Our residents want to be able to attend alone or as a family. Sending our family members away has not proven in past history to do any good, but to cause more harm and trauma. Let's not continue to repeat this history. We need to support these residents with basic needs when they are completing any type of treatment, as well as providing places to live and programs to continue to support them. Without these, they fall back into the cycle where they were before.
I heard a lot about medical travel on my door-to-door visits. Inuvik is a regional hub, but a lot of our residents get sent to Yellowknife and Edmonton. For many of those residents in Inuvik, a lot of them have never left Inuvik, and so, when we have residents who have to be sent to Yellowknife or Edmonton, it's very scary. They are already under stress from the illness or whatever they are being sent for, and then to have to do it alone is, in my opinion, inhumane to these residents because it causes a lot of stress on them. I have heard that because some elders can walk and can speak English that they do not qualify just because they are an elder. Well, what about fear and what about anxiety and all of those other things that this causes?
There is a lack of trust in our health system. With high turnover in staff, this lack of trust is continuing to build where residents do not want to access health services, as they are finding it difficult to trust the system and they feel like they are not being treated with respect. I feel that stabilizing the workforce will aid in building trust and connections with the residents and communities. It will also increase the cultural awareness and safety amongst the staff, instead of trying to teach them a four-hour course for a two-week period that they are going to spend in our community, and again and again and again. This type of training is not worth the manager's time, and it negatively impacts our community members.
Elders. We continue to hear that we have an aging population, and we know this to be true. We need to ensure that our elders can remain in their homes as long as they can. We need to support them by increasing after-hours and weekend home support for them so this can be a reality in all of our communities. Without this, families get burnt out, elders get neglected and eventually end up in our long-term cares before they need to.
Youth. We have heard a lot of things about mental health in our youth. We need to be working with our youth in our communities, especially in our small communities where they do not have a lot of services, they do not have a lot of recreational services, they lack a lot of support. With the recent suicides in our region, we have seen it; I have personally seen that our students, our teenagers, are suffering, and we need to work with them to find ways to make them feel like they are part of the community and achieve wellness.
Housing. Inuvik has a lack of affordable housing. Long wait lists; some have been waiting years. They are couch surfing on families' and wherever they can. Some live under buildings. Some live in tents. Some are staying in our shelters for years; permanently, it feels like.
I have heard that some of the policies are hindering or negatively impacting people who are in housing; for example, basing the rent on last year's income tax. This causes problems for some, as a lot of work is seasonal and there is no guarantee for income in the next year. An example, in our region, in our community is the Tuktoyaktuk Highway. We had a lot of people working on that project, but now it's done and people are expected to pay that higher rent this year based on their income last year, even though they may be unemployed.
Power bills are also an issue that I heard when I went door-to-door. In the past years, they have gone from having subsidized power in the housing units to having to pay full power. These buildings are the oldest buildings in our community, and are probably the least energy efficient, and these are our most vulnerable families who are living in these units and having to pay these high power bills. It is unacceptable. It takes away from their bottom dollar to feed their family. We need to find creative ways to deal with our housing issues right across the North.
Cost of living. The economy in Inuvik is down, and people are struggling to survive and pay their bills. At the same time that the economy is suffering, the cost of living in Inuvik continues to increase. Residents are concerned that they will no longer be able to live in Inuvik as a result of the high cost of living. In fact, I am aware of people who sell their homes altogether and leave the community. I am aware of people who are selling their homes to move into rentals or to go into low-cost housing because they just can't afford it. I heard from elders who took on programs in the previous governments who live in elder homes who no longer can afford to live in those homes and don't know how to manage their bills.
I have also heard that people are struggling with the price of natural gas. While a lot of our homes were converted to natural gas some time ago, the drastic increase to heat our homes is very concerning to the people of Inuvik. Our residents don't understand how we can have the infrastructure be surrounded by natural gas, yet still pay these high prices. We as a government need to find ways to make it affordable to live in all our communities.
Education. One of the terms that we hear over and over and over again, and I know the education system does not like to hear it, is social passing. It is a term that is used when our students move along through the system, but it is negatively impacting their ability to successfully move through the system. We have students who are very keen to know that they don't have to do the work to move along, and by the time they get to grade 10 we are seeing what we call, as my previous work in education as a board member, the "grade 10 bottleneck" where, by the time they move along to grade 9 and they move into grade 10, they are having difficulties advancing past this stage.
We need to look at how we are using that program in our system and ensuring that students who have the capability are not being social-passed. We need an education system that is equal to or better than the rest of Canada. This includes barrier-free childhood education, because if we have more of our early childhood kids from zero to five in programs that will enhance them, then by the time they get to kindergarten they will be ready. This is something that is near and dear to my heart, and I feel that this will help with all children having access to childcare and families that don't have to worry about how they're going to come up with paying that.
Attendance continues to be an issue that we face in the communities. We need to build bridges between families and the education system that will allow for better attendance. We still face an intergenerational trauma as a result of the residential school system and its effects, and we see this in all our outlying communities, and I'm sure we see it in Yellowknife, as well, that, once we have a family, and this is what I heard, is, "They are treating my child the way they treated me in school, and I'm not going to force them to be there." These are things that I have heard along the way.
We also need a strong regional college campus. We need to bring back programming that has been lost in our community. The Natural Resource Technology Program in our community provided jobs into our region. We know that there is a program in Fort Smith, but the people who took the program in our region got jobs in our region, trained in our region, and it was very successful.
We also lost the trades program in our region, and a lot of the members of our community need to have options in the region, because they do not want to pack up their families and go, and it's unrealistic for us to think that they should.
We know that we have an aging population, and yet we have sporadic health programs in our college. We had the home support worker. That is sporadic. We need to plan for future development that is going to be into our community. We need to provide those courses in our region so that people from our region are training and getting certified so that they can take care of our elders. We need to take care of own elders in our long-term care facilities.
I'll move on to jobs. As mentioned, in Inuvik, like all other communities, we all need jobs. We cannot lose any more jobs in our community due to centralization. We have lost some high-paying jobs in the justice and health field and our past leaders worked hard for decentralization. We need to review the BIP policy and create ways to ensure local contractors have a better chance of securing contracts, as opposed to outside contractors. An example might be including more points for a contractor who is local and even more points for hiring local, because that money stays in our community and it feeds our families and our communities. We need strong communities for a stronger NWT.
Working with our Indigenous people. We need to be working together with our Indigenous governments to achieve more for our residents. We need to remove unnecessary barriers that hinder this progress. We need to finalize land claims and self-government agreements, which will bring certainty to the NWT in terms of investments and creating true partnerships with our Indigenous governments.
Working with Canada. We also need Canada to play a bigger role in helping us achieve our goals. Canada can help us immensely to meet our objectives, to truly be the true North strong and free.
If we as the 19th Assembly can make progress on these issues over the next four years, they will have positive impacts on the NWT and our residents for years to come. Thank you. Quyanainni.