Madam Speaker, as Members are aware, I was absent from the House last week to attend the Nunavut economic summit in Rankin Inlet. This conference was organized by Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated and brought together representatives of all the major economic, political and Inuit organizations in Nunavut.
The purpose of this conference was to begin the process of developing a strategy to deal with the economic issues facing Nunavut prior to and after division. Judging from the tremendous participation in this conference and the interesting discussions during the course of the week, this conference provided an important starting point in the development of such a strategy.
Madam Speaker, I would like to commend the organizers of the conference, Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., for recognizing the need for this conference and for their hard work in making it a success.
Madam Speaker, I had the pleasure of being the keynote speaker at the closing banquet of this conference. I had an opportunity at that time to announce a number of important organizational initiatives that the departments of Economic Development and Tourism and Transportation have recently initiated.
Anyone familiar with the tourism industry in the Northwest Territories is familiar with the frustration in trying to develop a territorial-wide tourism strategy. The simple fact of the matter is that tourism operators in the eastern and western Arctic face very different challenges and have very different needs, both in terms of marketing and business assistance.
In an effort to deal with these differences, the Department of Economic Development and Tourism will soon initiate discussions with the private sector on the establishment of two separate tourism authorities for the western Arctic and Nunavut. These new organizations would be led by the private sector in partnership with government. They would be the primary agents responsible for the development of tourism in the east and west, for the delivery of tourism marketing programs presently being delivered by government and for the development of tourism strategies that better fit their region.
Secondly, Madam Speaker, the department will soon begin negotiations on a new economic development agreement with the federal government. It is our intent to negotiate one formal agreement with two sub-agreements for the western Arctic and Nunavut. These sub-agreements will recognize the different economic priorities of the two regions and serve as a model for the new economic development agreements for the two new territories.
Madam Speaker, as Members are aware, during the past 12 months, we have decentralized much of the decision-making and financial authority for both the departments of Economic Development and Tourism and Transportation from headquarters to the regional level. The next logical step in the process is to further reorganize these departments to ensure that there is one senior manager primarily responsible for the operational and planning decisions of the department in the western Arctic and in Nunavut.
I have instructed the deputy ministers of Economic Development and Tourism and Transportation to bring forward these recommendations prior to the end of the year. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
---Applause