Mr. Chair, with respect to one of my communities in the Sahtu, I have been raising the issue since I was first elected in 1987 that the infrastructure Tulita has will provide clean, consistent, good quality water to the community.
We have been working on it for 12 years. We have had engineers look at it and consultants study it. As Mr. Krutko knows, that does not always result in getting the job done.
I have no problem in making the commitment that we need to involve the MLA, the chief and some local contractors, and only one engineer. We will sit down and figure out how to get this job done. If it is left to normal government planning cycles we will still be talking about it 12 years from now. I think it is something we just need to sit down and fix.
We do that by making a commitment to find a solution and address it. That is how I would respond to that. We need to focus on it. It is one of the most basic things that people should be assured of and they are not. I know the situation in Fort McPherson needs a solution. We need to make a commitment to work on it.
In the area of health care, we know many of the costs we incur on an annual basis are because of problems we have with alcoholism, violence and abuse that goes on in our communities. Many of these things are self-inflicted. Many of these things happen because we do it to ourselves. Our people are suffering, they are traumatized and they are abused, and they need support. At the same time, we know we do not have to beat our wives. We do not have to neglect our children. There are many things we do to ourselves that I think we can set as targets and try to manage and diminish the cost of them.
We need to provide an economic strategy so there are jobs for our young people and there are jobs for the husbands and wives who want to work. Once the quality of life and the level of income go up, people will feel a sense of well being and they will turn to help themselves become stronger and more self- reliant.
That is the thing we all need to try and provide. With health care, we do not have the money to do an adequate job right now. Our resources are diminishing. We need to somehow try to help people become more self reliant and more responsible for their actions. Thank you.