Mr. Speaker, the implementation plan has been tabled and needs to have a minor but critical amendment to it today. I will be tabling an amendment to page eight. I think we left out a critical word in the document. Having said that, the document is made available to the Members. It sets out the way in which we to propose to follow a process of implementation on community transfer initiatives across the territories. We are going to take the approach that only those communities that express an interest will enter into discussions. Once we have a better idea of the general approach of interested communities and the kinds of resources that would be required to fund the discussions, we enter into discussions with those communities that express an interest. Then we will come back to the Legislature with a supp for money.
It is my hope that Members of the Legislature on the advice from the constituencies, will give us some idea of what they may require for their particular constituencies. That is one of the steps that will have to be taken early in the new year.
I think it is important to point out to Members that while we cannot expect ourselves as Ministers to respond to all 76 communities in the territories we hope to respond to as many as possible. Members should know that because of the number of sittings we have, the opportunity to meet all communities at a time when they are interested is not as flexible as we would like.
We have made contact with all the Gwich'in communities. We have had an initial talk with the community of Tuktoyaktuk. We have an invitation from Sachs Harbour which I hope to go into sometime in January. We are waiting for some definite dates from the Dogrib communities as to when they would like to have some preliminary discussions at a regional or community level. There has been a visit to Cape Dorset which requires some follow-up. We are trying to do that presently. There was an initial meeting in Pond Inlet, again with some follow-up required. In some cases the communities have been specific. The interest in a number of communities is to work on community justice and to see what they can do to move in that specific area. As for other areas, we are looking at moving on housing, either taking over responsibility for the housing associations or the housing programs themselves.
We are looking at flushing out the complex areas of responsibility that are presently under Social Services. Many communities have expressed an interest to have a discussion without any prejudice to future dealings on what exactly is on the table, what is available for discussion and what information is available. Some communities have asked for very detailed information about specific dollar amounts that are related to the discussions. For instance, one community wanted to know how much it costs for an inmate to travel to Yellowknife and back and the daily cost of incarceration for an inmate, to have some idea what the figure might be if a proposal were developed for the community to take responsibility for inmates at the community or regional level. That is the status of the community transfer initiatives. We are trying to finish off the ones that were initiated years ago. For instance, in Norman Wells, they have had discussions now for four years about taking over the natural gas system and water and sewage. We hoped that this would be finalized initially by January. It is now scheduled for March because of some setbacks. We are trying to finish off the ones that we started in earlier years. Thank you.