Thank you Madam Chair. The whole question of community empowerment and especially in my riding, the region, we do have another process, which is the self-government process that is presently underway, which they are looking at having a document, agreement-in-principle in place by next spring. Basically you were going after the same items in regards to program delivery, and also looking at community structures.
Right now, in the case of Fort McPherson, for instance, you have the hamlet council, you have the Metis local, you have the band council, you have several other organizations in the community, which makes it awfully cumbersome to deal with issues, especially if there are overlapping interests, such as programs for say, recreation, or else even programs in regards to program delivery for social services or housing. You have the band on one hand which represents almost ninety percent of the residents, and the hamlet on the other hand who basically represents a large majority of the population, also Metis locals, which represent the other portion of the population. To date, in Fort McPherson they have requested to sit down and start negotiating community council structures like they have in Arctic Red River, Tsiigehtchic, and also in Fort Good Hope. Start looking at the creation of community councils to cut down on the administration and bureaucracy we have in the community, where you have one administration body within a community which administers the administration of programs for the municipal affairs through one council. That has been an ongoing process which they requested input from MACA out of Inuvik to kick start this process, start the deliberations. To date, it is basically not even at a crawling stage. It is pretty slow. There is still a lot of animosity between the hamlet and the bands. The bands want to do some things, the hamlet wants to do something else. They cannot see eye to eye on a lot of these things. Also, the problem that the communities are seeing, about taking over responsibilities from government with no assurances that there would be some guarantee for a protection clause in there that if anything happens that the Government of the Northwest Territories will be solely responsible. So that if there is a funding allocation which basically there is an overexpenditure, or else if they fall short in their revenues, that they are able to go back to the government and ask for more revenues, if that is what it takes. But there has to be a more co-operative approach to those other organizations that are presently working in this field also.
In the case of Aklavik you have the Aboriginal Council, which consists of Inuvialuit, the Gwich'in, the Metis, along with the hamlet council, trying to formulate some sort of a mechanism that everyone is involved in regards to the day-to-day decision making. There again, it is a cumbersome process again, you can not just drop something on a community without the other interest groups wanting to have a say or participate in the matter. In the case of Tsiigehtchic, the other community I represent, they have adopted basically a community charter, similar to Fort Good Hope, which seems to be working. They have taken the approach of resolving the Band administration, the Municipal administration under one roof, basically running programs and services through that agent. Basically they call a meeting, you only have to deal with one meeting where you deal with all community issues, you do not have to go to a Band Council meeting, get a Motion from there, then running back to the Hamlet Council, getting another Motion from there. Basically, those have to be looked at in the context of what is happening here in regards to the regional Self Government Initiative. They are also developing institutions and mechanisms to implement those self-government agreements, which is another process that is presently in the process of being developed. There again, we have to formulate how those things work. In the regional context, we are formulating Beaufort leaders conferences looking at the whole overall regional structures. We have the Education Boards, we have the Health Boards, in regards to the Gwich'in Tribal Council, the Inuvialuit, tax based municipalities, all those infrastructures. We are talking about down-sizing government, will have to be affected some way or another or involved in the overall complexity of what you are doing here. This is just one component of a larger component that we are looking at. At the end of the day, it all comes down to cost. In my riding, I raised the question earlier to the Minister of Finance of fairness. In the case of Fort McPherson and Aklavik, the reason that they are not gung-ho about this is because they have see no productivity from this Government in relation to programs and services in regards to infrastructure--maintaining the road system in Aklavik. They do not even have money in their budget to have gravel to upgrade their roads. The same thing in McPherson, they have a lot of potholes and problems with the infrastructure falling apart in regards to the water treatment plant, the whole cost of that infrastructure. There are no guarantees that you are not going to have a major breakdown down the road, and who is going to be responsible for that? I think you have to look at it. Thank you.