Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Congratulations. Colleagues, welcome to the Assembly. People of the Northwest Territories, thank you for joining in, listening and watching.
The Northwest Territories, our collective home, is a place of tremendous natural beauty. It’s a place of great wealth in natural resources. The diversity of our people is one of our greatest assets. We have a relationship as a public government with Aboriginal governments that does not exist in any other jurisdiction in this country. Our capital city, Yellowknife, is one of the most recognized progressive cities in the country. This is a land of great opportunity. It is a land where we have unique northern lifestyles in our communities.
We do, as well, have a very high level of services, but it is not without challenges. We have cost of living issues; we have a disparity between large and small, north and south. How do we deal with that? We have housing issues, as every Member knows. We have issues with health. We have issues with education, employment, infrastructure. We have issues in terms of the balance between land, water and animals, and resource development. We have this issue because we do
not have control over the decision-making that would allow us to control those very critical processes.
We face the challenge of time. We started this Assembly with 1,460 days. We are now at 1,434 days; the clock never stops ticking. We have challenges with money. What is the way forward?
People need and ask for control. They ask for decision-making in the North. Since 1967 – 44 years – we have been on a path to political evolution, to greater responsibility. Not only the public government but the Aboriginal governments. Land claims have been settled: Inuvialuit, Gwich’in, Sahtu, Tlicho. At the same time we have taken over education, forestry, health. We managed our way through the division of the Northwest Territories; the last partitioning of Canada that will ever occur in our lifetime. Now we are at the next step, the final piece of the devolution process: taking over the decision- making for land, water and resource development.
People tell us we don’t have enough money. We need infrastructure. We need programs. We need resources. People tell us we want to be able to have the final say in what our regulatory regime is going to look like. They tell us they want to have a say in how our water is going to be protected and what we’re going to do with the animals. Then the way is clear. As my colleague Mr. McLeod pointed out, devolution is the single biggest political priority in the life of this Assembly. It will bring money to the North. In the last five years we’ve left over $300 million on the table just on the resource sharing part, $65 million a year to our A-base for operations, 175 jobs to come north that we will commit to move out to the regions and to the communities in discreet operational pieces that make sense but that will spread the wealth of devolution around.
We need the political control. We’re the last two jurisdictions in the country that do not have the right to say how the land, water and resource development will happen. We have to wait for the distant master in Ottawa.
To do this we need to conclude this process. We need to look at our land use framework that was to be done in the 16th Assembly that was not done.
We need to do the work in a way that allows us to collaborate with our most natural allies, the Aboriginal governments.
The body that we collectively as Northerners face and negotiate with is Ottawa. It should not be with each other with Ottawa watching us. We have to collectively, through the path that we have learned works, through the Water Strategy process, through the Wildlife Act strategy process, through the process we used with the Species at Risk Act where the Aboriginal governments and working
groups with public government collectively got a Water Strategy that is held in high regard across the land, a Wildlife Act that, with all its problems, demonstrated that we can work together and deliver world-class legislation. The Species at Risk Act is another process. Working with the Aboriginal governments, hands on the pen, we can do this.
We cannot turn our back on the political levers; we cannot continue to turn our back on all the money that is not going to be retroactive that we’re never going to get back; not when we will all stand up in this House and we will all say we need more money for housing, for health, for education, for roads, for libraries, for schools, for food programs. We have to be consistent. We have to be collaborative. We have to get this piece done.
Another important piece we have to conclude, tied to devolution, is we have some very, very important transboundary water negotiations that are currently underway with Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia. The headwaters of most of our rivers are in other jurisdictions. Water has been identified as one of the biggest single concerns that unify Northerners. Those negotiations are critical to conclude. They have to be legally binding and they have to offer the protection that all our constituents tell us that they want as we look at the concerns of the development that is happening in other jurisdictions and us, the Northwest Territories, being the downstream jurisdiction that is the recipient of the results of a lot of that decision- making.
As we look at all the challenges ahead of us, the most immediate ones are going to be the managing of the budget, the $1.3 billion that we spend yearly on behalf of our constituents. We are now at a time where we have to approve a capital plan where we know infrastructure needs exceed our ability to pay, that there is constant upward pressure on all the services we provide.
We have borrowing limit negotiations underway with the federal government that have to be concluded. We are very confident that we will have a successful conclusion to that, but we have to get that piece done if we are going to give ourselves the fiscal flexibility as a new Assembly to do the very many things that we are collectively going to say need to be done as we finally establish our priorities.
We do have to revitalize our Ottawa office. We have to have a closer working relationship with the federal government on a daily basis. We need feet on the ground in Ottawa with capable resources that know our priorities, that will open doors, that will push our message when we are not there, that will help us arrange meetings for when we go on our very many travels to Ottawa to push our priorities. We have to have, as well, a very good
working relationship with our Member of Parliament, duly elected by the people of the Northwest Territories, who is there to represent us. We have to look at every opportunity and avenue in Ottawa to advance our interests.
As I’ve indicated, we have to sit down with the Aboriginal governments and work out our relationship. We have to remind them of the good work that’s been done with the Water Strategy, the Wildlife Act, the Species at Risk Act, that we can do this. Collectively we can do this. We have done it; we know we can do it. The pressure is on us on this, our single biggest political priority.
Another key area of concern is the maintaining of programs and services. The whole range from those yet to be born, to our seniors. We have to look for government efficiencies to see where we can do the job better. To see where, if necessary, we can re-profile money. We know right now we are in the process of having to negotiate four collective agreements in a time of fiscal restraint, in a time of cost cutting across the land; we have to do that in a fair way that recognizes those realities.
We are spending 65 cents of every dollar on social programs. Health costs are an immediate continuing pressure. There are things we have to do. We have to try to continue to push – and this has been an issue for me in my 16 years in this Assembly – we have to be prepared to continue to push Northerners to start making the right choices when it comes to personal choices: smoking, drinking, diet, exercise; four simple things that would free up for us as a territory resources to put to use that are now going to be consumed addressing those issues. We have talked about prevention over the years but we have only managed to put less than a percent of our health budget towards prevention. I would suggest to you that as an Assembly that we should be targeting that number to increase over the life of this Assembly to 2 percent so that we can do the work that we say needs to be done in health, education, MACA, working at the front end with the children and the youth to help them make the right choices, to create the environment for those right choices to be made.
We spent a lot of the last Assembly talking about an Anti-Poverty Strategy. This is an issue that is work undone. I suggest once again, given all the time that we’ve already had this on the government table, on this legislative table, that we should say within six months we want an Anti-Poverty Strategy on our table that we can move forward with, that we can start to address the very many wide ranges of issues that have to be done.
As we look at our struggles and our challenges, infrastructure is there. The biggest one to me that has the potential to benefit most immediately
Northerners is the fibre optic link from Inuvik down the valley, hooking in all the communities along the way that will make Inuvik one of only two sites in the whole world that has a remote sensing capability that will give Inuvik a non-renewable resource-based economy. It will bring significant resources into the Beaufort-Delta. It will allow every community up and down the valley to have the best communication systems so that telehealth works, so that the children can use the libraries, so that businesses can do their work in the communities knowing that it’s economically viable. There will be no excuse not to move jobs outside of Yellowknife because we don’t have the capability and services outside of Yellowknife. I speak specifically of those jobs from devolution.
Pending a successful conclusion of the borrowing limit, we have to be able to look at the Tuk-Inuvik highway to conclude that. It’s a national priority. We have to find a way to do our part to make this one go ahead.
We have to look at how we do our capital planning. Once again pending a successful conclusion with our borrowing limit discussions. We have about half a billion dollars of health facility work that needs to be done, not to mention all the other capital needs: Stanton, Hay River, Norman Wells, Fort Simpson – our four facilities that either need to be replaced or renewed. That challenge alone is going to require us to look at all the possibilities and options that we have available to meet those needs. At the same time, to continue to address the broader needs in all the other areas where capital infrastructure investment is required.
The Mackenzie Valley Highway remains a very significant piece of work for us as a territory that will help open up the valley, hopefully tied at some point to the pipeline, which will in fact be the biggest game changer of them all. As Mr. McLeod indicated, the signs that we are hearing seem very positive that this in fact may become a reality.
Those capital infrastructure needs and all the other ones that we have before us challenge us, but it is doable. We have to manage our way through this collectively. We have to do the things necessary to try to realize this and look at how we do our capital planning process. Those are some of the key areas that we have to work on that we, I think, all collectively agree are issues of concern. The path today is to pick the person best suited to do the work; do the work with the Assembly, do the work with the communities of the Northwest Territories, do the work with the other levels of government.
You have been taking our measure. Now, for some you’ve taken the measure of myself. For 16 years I’ve been in this House. We’ve spent the last two weeks together in very intimate, close contact, finding out once again the measure of the people
that are putting their names forward both for Premier and for Cabinet. In my case, 16 years in this Assembly, 10 years in Cabinet. I have had portfolios that are challenging: education, health for five and a half years, environment for five years, Finance Minister for three, workers’ compensation. Looking at those, you add up the issues of experience, you want to look at the issues of work ethic, you want to look at the issues of are we and will we be, individually and collectively, the role models that we have to be for the people of the Northwest Territories in terms of how we do work. As we tell people to make the right personal choices, we have to be prepared to do that as well.
My record is there for observation. It’s there for scrutiny. Can I get things done? I will say yes. If I look just at this Assembly alone, some of the things that have happened that I have been responsible for are the Water Strategy, the Species at Risk Act, the Wildlife Act, the Greenhouse Gas Strategy. We’ve come out with three good budgets in a time that has been labelled the worst economic time. We brought forward a Heritage Fund. I was instrumental in bringing forward the $60 million that we needed for the alternative energy initiatives that I think we all agree have to be brought forward and continued in some way. Wind, biomass, solar, recycling, a balanced budget so that we have enough money to do the work. We’ve avoided program cuts, we’ve avoided layoffs. That’s because collectively we’ve made the choices necessary, and in that case we came forward with a budget that was accepted by this Assembly after all of the discussions.
So today the challenge is in the next few minutes to make a decision which of us is best suited after having taken our measure to represent the people of the Northwest Territories as Premier, to move the priority list of this Assembly and of the people of the Northwest Territories forward to get things done. That will be our challenge, that will be our task collectively in the next few minutes, and I thank you for your time and it’s been an honour to be here. Thank you.