On page 16 the point is made that in the NWT,
outside of the large centres, all we really have is social housing. In any kind of developed economy we found that construction is vital to an economy. It is very often used as an indicator of the strength of your economy. Even this current federal budget that we heard yesterday recognized that something had to be done about the construction industry and especially in relation to housing.
I mentioned earlier the concern I had that this report talks about strength at one level and another level. You have to really decide what you are going to do with the strength. If you decide that what we want to do is have a strong government and the way to do it is this, it is no good just looking at the structure. You have to have some vision and some policies and some programs, and so on. The concern I have is that we may spend an awful lot of time tinkering, as we did in the last Assembly. We spent quite a bit of time preoccupied with making sure our structures reflected our priorities, which did not last long. We spent an awful lot of time and money shifting things all over the place to reflect the priorities that we had, and within months we want to junk it because we want to do something else, except it has to be clear, if we are going to concentrate on this issue of strength at two levels, what it is in fact that you are going to do. What is it you are going to do? What is your vision? So I would hope that many of the things we have identified as priorities over the last while would be somehow reflected. Maybe in the Budget Address in the summer we will have a kind of platform or a program to reaffirm what you are going to do with the strength once you have asserted it.
I just wanted to make that point that housing continues to be a massive problem, and this report recognizes it, and much of the work we did in the past recognizes it. It is a key element in any kind of economic strategy that we have. There are all kinds of problems with it, and Mr. Morin has an unenviable job in trying to deal with that huge problem of looking at ways in which people can get housing.
However, if we go to page 17, which was the last page you mentioned, Mr. Chairman, in the middle of the last paragraph there is a comment, a sentence if you like, which I have pondered over and I cannot understand it. This is the sentence. Maybe I should read quite a bit in front of it so that it has the complete context. It says: "Accordingly, the work of government should be shared (divided) more evenly with communities, and the territorial government should transfer more responsibility and resources to communities in the area of providing 'services to people.' This is not a question of further decentralization, but of enhancing the capacity of the community level of government."
Now, I read that sentence lots of times over the last little while and really cannot figure out what it means. It says you are not going to decentralize, and yet what I understand is being proposed is transfer from one level to another level. You are going to provide means by which people can do something. Here we are told that we are not going to do that. What we are going to do is to enhance the capacity of the community level of government. Is there any way of getting a better understanding of what is meant by "enhancing the capacity of the community level of government"? If in fact it means something different from providing you with resources and programs and so on, and giving them options as to what they want to do -- if that is not being proposed, then what is being proposed? If we are not talking about two levels, strength here and strength there, and giving communities control over their own programs, then what does it mean? What do we mean, that we are not going to do that, we are not going to decentralize, we are not going to get rid of stuff and put it at another level, but we are going to enhance the capacity of the community level of government? Does it mean that we are going to give it a new title or a new status, if you like? Are we going to change the way we look at what a community is? Are we going to rename them all and at least create some way of demonstrating to people that somehow they are different from what they used to be; that you are going to enhance the capacity of the community level of government? I wonder if that could be explained to us as to what is meant by that.