Thank you, Madam Chair. I am not quite sure if we are saying the same thing or not, but I will get my two cents' worth. Having had the opportunity to work and live in small communities like Tuk and Arviat, I like to think I have a fairly good grasp and understanding of community empowerment.

Firstly, I want to make it very, very clear, crystal clear, that I am in support of community empowerment. Having said that, I do have some reservations and I think we have heard from most of the people who have spoken today and over the last few weeks that there are reservations and concerns. Briefly, my concern is that we provide adequate training for the people in communities so that when they take on these responsibilities and these jobs, that we are not setting them up to fail. We have to provide, within reason -- I think we all know that we have limited resources in our budget, but there has to be enough monies put into the kitty so that they can run their show in an efficient and effective manner. If they get into trouble, there has to be some flexibility to help them in the system.

As Mr. Miltenberger said, this is not a new initiative. It has been around for a long, long time. I think the sad commentary here is that it is very, very unfortunate that this initiative did not take place, did not occur when this government was a lot more healthy and flush with funding. Here we are now providing the communities with the opportunity to take on these new initiatives and to take on these additional responsibilities, but we are saying we are going to let them take it on but they probably have to run it on a shoe string, or close to it.

In closing, I will just say that I will work very hard with my two communities, and I know they are interested in community empowerment, to ensure that they do succeed and that they get whatever assistance that we can provide through this Assembly again to ensure their success. Thank you.

Thank you Madam Chair. I believe I am on the record a number of times in Hansard, of my support for community empowerment. I would certainly not, in good conscience, deny the rights of residents of any community, to have what I have in my own community. I believe I have got community empowerment. I have a municipal government that generates taxes, makes decisions on my behalf. I could not in good conscience oppose community empowerment, and those same rights for anyone living in any community, regardless of size.

What I am opposed to is the speed that community empowerment seems to be moving at, and the lack of a concrete plan, that everyone can sit down. I think there has certainly been demonstrated here today, the number of questions that remain unanswered. The people that are asking these questions, are people that have been dealing with, and have had access to information about community empowerment. It that number of questions are not clear, or have not been answered for those individuals, I think there is probably less of an understanding outside of this legislature.

What I would like to do, is I would like to see community empowerment done once, and it done correct the first time. I think that could be achieved by a much slower speed than what is proposed. I believe MACA as a lead ministry for community empowerment does presently have the resources and people to work with communities, and get it right the first time, a small number of communities, produce a manual if you will, and go on and increase the number of communities that community empowerment could be extended to.

From my perspective, we hear about such things as "our communities want it". Well, I would turn around and say, well why do the communities not take it? Why do you not take the initiative? Why do you not initiate a tax regime, where you can take control? If you are generating funds in your own community, that is control. And then you can be accountable in your own community. My understanding is that we have only a handful of communities in the Northwest Territories that are tax-based. So community empowerment will not work properly until a community is generating its own taxes, and can be responsible and accountable. I think we are walking around with our heads in the clouds, if we think otherwise. That is the basis for a community. You raise your own taxes, and you get support from another level of government.

I also hear the Minister of Finance and the Premier talk about MLAs having less of a role. My community has community empowerment, Fort Smith, Hay River, Inuvik. I question whether my role and responsibilities are lessened because my community has community empowerment. We hear comments about the day of civil servants in far away places making decisions for people in communities. Have we forgotten that we still have Ottawa? This is a community that is making decisions that affect us. We have input to those decisions by our elected officials, no different than what we have in the Northwest Territories. I still believe that communities can have community empowerment, but they first of all, have to have a tax base, to have some empowerment, to have some control.

I believe that you do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that if you have three different departments providing a service, for example, maintenance to houses, DPW doing it, Housing Corporation, and another department doing that, it does not make an awful lot of sense, to have that number of maybe half-time people, have one person provide those responsibilities, or privatize or whatever. Those community empowerment initiatives are excellent. But there are still many many more out there that still can be accommodated.

That is all I have at this time, but I certainly will have lots of questions on community empowerment, when we get out of the opening remarks. Thank you Madam Chair.

I am sorry, Mr. Miltenberger was asking me a question here. I did not want him to wait until I was finished, before I answered him. I just want to indicate that I am totally in support of community empowerment. I have worked towards it for many years. before I decided to run for office, and I still totally support it.

I think it should be totally clear that community empowerment is not about the ability to have a tax base. It is not about the ability to write checks for social assistance. It is all about having a say about what happens in your own community. It is about having choices, real choices, not just administering programs that have been approved five or six hundred miles away.

I think a lot of people totally resent the analogy of the communities being like children. But I guess perhaps once people have been in the situation of being almost like a benevolent father, they like to keep it that way. I agree with Mr. Todd. It is insulting to insinuate that the communities cannot run their own affairs, that they cannot make their own choices. Once they meet a minimum standard, that they cannot decide that they want to use their money in another area, which they cannot do now. Of course there are risks. That is what community empowerment is about. It is making people accountable. This government has made lots of mistakes. Communities will make mistakes too. But it seems to me they cannot do much worse than this government has done in the past. When you take someone from Ottawa, and parachute them into a community, they do not know a thing about it.

I am not too sure about the eastern communities, although I have been to a couple, and where I was at this past winter, they certainly showed a lot of interest. I do know about the west, because I have been working with communities in the west, over here. They have been saying for years they want community empowerment. But they want meaningful control over programs and services. Our present systems encourage dependency. Some people seem to want to keep it that way. As I indicated before, the way it is today, we make a one size fits all program, and we expect all the communities to fit into that little mould, whether it is in Tuktoyaktuk, Yellowknife, Holman Island or some place else.

A few years back I worked with the Housing Corporation, the district office, and at that time they used be called district offices, in Hay River. They used to be programs coming from administration in Yellowknife that were totally out of reality. The workers at the district level saying they just do not work, because they are all coming out of Yellowknife. Yet, I still hear people here espousing that we should continue to do the same thing. We have all said that there are too many community committees, and that communities should be involved, deciding how to reduce costs. This is our opportunity. People will have to be accountable. People in offices in the communities will have to be held accountable if they make mistakes.

This is the first time I have seen this information from the department. I am just looking at the amount of money that we spend in administration. It looks like almost fifty percent or more of our dollars goes to administration. If that kind of money can go to programs to actually go to the people in the communities, I think they will have a lot of money, to hire whoever they want. Whether it is people who are community people who have graduated and decided to leave their home town because there are no jobs, why should they stay home if there are no jobs? However, if we do provide the communities with money, a lot of people will go back to their smaller communities, to their home towns. I have seen it happen already. Places where they cannot hire their own local people they can hire people who are working for the government now. Or they can hire someone from Ottawa, or Edmonton, the same as the Government of the Northwest Territories does. The big difference is they will be working for the community. They will not be flying in and out from Fort Simpson, or from Rankin, or some other regional centre. We are not talking about the GNWT just hanging people out to dry. We are talking about the GNWT providing training, and support services. Those support services will have to remain for a long time of course. In some instances, we will have to provide them more than for others.

Communities will not have to take everything over all at once. We are not just going to say okay here is five million dollars, you are on your own - hire all your own people - even if they do not want to. A community might just want to take Housing, two years later they might want to take something else, two years later something else.

I know in Dettah and N'Dilo they signed the __________ Funding Agreement for Housing a couple of years back and their housing program is working today better than it ever did before. So I know it can work. But Dettah and N'Dilo are not professing that they want to take everything over all at once either. They are working, they are planning but they definitely want to take a lot more and I think that we as elected representatives should be giving those types of communities every opportunity, the support that they require. Not to be running out on them and crying wolf - scaring them - saying you are not going to get enough money - you are not going to have no support - you do not have enough people to work to help you run your own programs.

As I said earlier, I am in total support of community empowerment and I will do whatever I can to help it be implemented particularly in this area around here. Thank you.

Thank you Madam Chair. I do have a few comments I would like to make on this issue. And while I am doing that I think what I will do also is to give Members some examples of what - of some of the areas that I know of that the government is doing - more specifically to answer Mr. Picco's question about giving examples.

Before Mr. Erasmus spoke, I was just amazed at the amount of doom and gloom that was being talked about and I could not figure out how Members figured the sky was going to fall if we empower communities and gave people in communities a say in what they - what goes on in their settlements. And a lot of background has been - a lot of the reasoning has been said over and over again and I think it is important to note that we are trying to do what our constituencies want us to do - to give them more power and more say.

The Minister of MACA and I were in the Baffin region at the Baffin Leadership Summit several months ago talking about community empowerment and basically giving them some of the principles of why the government planned to do what we were going to and as I recall there was only one community that had some reservations about it - only one mayor and in the end he ended up moving the motion to support the community empowerment.

I know there is and continues to be concerns about training and capacity of our communities. There are still questions that will have to be answered about funding, about territorial interests, etc. But I have not heard anything today that would cause me to say that I do not support community empowerment anymore. I do support community empowerment very much. I know the thirteen settlements in the Baffin region do and it is up to us to guide and support them.

As Mr. Erasmus said, we are not just going to hand over the funding and the programs and say there you go - go on your way. As was said earlier, I believe too that empowerment is part of the evolution of our communities on how they should run their own affairs. When I was growing up I recall we used to have what were called "Settlement Managers" and I believe most of the communities in the Territories had them and the Inuk name for the Settlement Manager basically translated to "Settlement Bosses". I think at one point our Finance Minister was one of them. There was - there is a gentleman who lives in Yellowknife now who was and who is still a family friend when I was growing up - he was a Settlement Manager. People went to him for permission on what they should do, he issued Social Assistance cheques and in the minds of people he had a say in the lives of just about everybody in that community. It is not because that was the kind of person he was - it was the job that he had and that was the way the government ran.

Where we are today is nowhere near that. We have gone far, far beyond that and we still have a ways to go. I have not heard anything today that would cause me to say, as I said before, let us stop now and this is as far as we are going with the communities. We need to keep going. We need to be giving them more power and authority.

One of the communities that I represent, Cape Dorset, was one of the communities that was in the pilot project for community transfer initiatives and what that is just a step before community empowerment concept. Basically what the GNWT did was transfer the funding and the programs to the communities as they were, with all the personnel but not with the flexibility. What community empowerment, as I understand it, as I believe it to be, is you go a step beyond that and you give the community the flexibility to do what they need to do with the funding and the programs.

There are a couple of things I have seen in Cape Dorset that give me some hope in what this thing can do. In the area of Social Assistance, the community members have talked quite openly about Social Assistance, dependency, about fraud, and how they can get young people that are in their homes, not in school, not looking for work, watching t.v., and gathering Social Assistance - how they can get them on their feet. Get them out and becoming healthy. They are talking about that openly and have some pretty innovative solutions or suggestions on how to fix that.

In the area of housing the community has been quite active in teaching or educating clients on how to run a household, how to pay bills, etc. When it was an outside agency, the government that ran these things, people did not have an ownership and people basically just went on a day by day basis and without - with very little sense of responsibility.

I said I would give some examples of some of the areas that I know of that are happening in your constituencies right now and maybe some of these you do not know about or some Members might not know about.

An example I have will be from the Housing Corporation which happens to be the portfolio that I run. In the North Slave the responsibility for all (?) housing delivery in Dettah, N'Dilo and Fort Rae has been transferred to the local bands. The Snare Lake Dene Band has taken over staff housing, property management and the delivery of home ownership programs. Discussions on program transfers with Rae Lakes and Wha Ti Bands continue. The City of Yellowknife may also be interested in housing at this point in time.

In the South Slave, local housing organization boards and staff have been consulted on assuming more program delivery responsibilities. Communities' specific plans are being developed to transfer all functions to the community level within the next eighteen months.

Discussions also continue in a number of communities with respect to amalgamation and transfer of home ownership programs and community governments. Local housing organizations in Aklavik, Fort McPherson, Fort Good Hope, Norman Wells and Inuvik are being prepared to assume responsibility for the home ownership application process this year. Discussion on amalgamation and transfer of additional programs are underway in Aklavik, Sachs Harbour, Tsiigehtchic, Tuktoyaktuk, and Tulita.

Programs in the Baffin - programs have been transferred to local housing organizations in seven of the eight communities where these programs are delivered. Discussions to amalgamate local housing organizations with municipal governments are underway in Arctic Bay, Clyde River, Igloolik, Pangnirtung, Pond Inlet, Resolute Bay, and Sanikiluaq.

In the Kitikmeot the Hamlet of Pelly Bay has taken over the responsibility for all housing programs as of April 1, 1996. Holman has signed a Memorandum of Understanding to amalgamate housing in the Hamlet by April 1, 1997.

In the Keewatin, community governments express interest in taking over all of the housing programs in the region and requested that LHO's be amalgamated with Hamlets by April 1, 1997. Rankin Inlet is preparing for amalgamation on November 1, 1996 and all the other amalgamation will be completed by April 1, 1997.

Madam Chair, the reason I listed some of those things that are going on already is because I saw the debate seemed to be going in the area of whether or not to empower communities. As Mr. Miltenberger said earlier, this thing is going to go ahead with or without us - in fact it is going ahead, it has gone ahead and it is up to do as good a job as we can.

I, like other Ministers, are more than willing to share with MLA's what the different departments are doing with your specific communities. In fact, there are a lot of things going on. With that Madam Chair, I will finish. Thank you.

Thank you Madam Chair. Just very briefly. I feel that communities have been dictated by the government at the territorial level and the Canadian government for a very long time. The communities, whether they are small communities or not, have been asking for more responsibilities and more powers to take over responsibilities in their communities.

I understand that we are going through a lot of changes this time and nobody really likes going through changes because they fear but listening to all the other Members this afternoon, I think most communities in the Northwest Territories are willing to take community empowerment because I understand three communities in Baffin Central are willing to take community empowerment.

I think we will be making mistakes in the future but it does not hurt sometimes to make a few mistakes. If I feel that my communities need help in order to take over community empowerment, I feel that it is my responsibility, as a leader for those communities, to help them out if they need help. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. For years there has been discussion of the importance of having decisions made at the level closest to the people affected and this has been a goal of several previous Assemblies and prior governments have tried and tried again through a number of initiatives -- one mentioned earlier called the "Prime Public Authority Initiative" and the others, the "Community Transfer Initiative" and so on and the idea was also a cornerstone of the "Strength at Two Levels" report.

This has been something discussed in the Tenth Legislative Assembly in the Eleventh and as well in the Twelfth Assembly. Each time we have needed to start all over again. It has been frustrating to see the delay in providing communities with the authority to make their own decisions. The people in the North were making decisions about how to deal with their own affairs, how to handle their own social issues and how to serve their own people long before the current model government was imposed.

Basically, the community empowerment initiative is simply giving the people decision-making authorities that were somewhat taken away when the current form of the bureaucracy was brought here a number of years ago. After all these years, we are finally making progress towards empowering communities to take charge of their own affairs. I think that the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs and her officials deserve a lot of credit for moving this initiative forward as progressively as they have.

As the Minister of Transportation and as well the Minister of Safety and Public Services, I have seen this progress first hand.

We have seen how, by transferring responsibilities for some of the programs and services to the communities, better decisions are being made that affect the people, decisions that have been made with the leaders that were elected locally.

For years, for example, the issue of lottery administration as been a contentious one. People in the communities have been aware of the impact of things like bingos and other gambling on the social conditions on the people in the communities. People have seen the social causes and have wanted to have some direct control over these things. Now that this Department of Safety and Public Services has made progress towards placing this decision-making authority in the hands of the communities and the department has ensured that these transfers have received all the training and the authorities in the communities have received the training and the support that they need.

We are also moving towards empowerment in the area of transportation. Discussions, for instance, have been under way with Tuktoyaktuk for about two years. We have moved from using a territorial government workforce for airport operations to contract with the hamlet. We have also contracted directly with the upgrade of the air terminal building. We have been involved in discussions with Baker Lake for the transfer of the airport. This idea has now been expanded to include consideration of airport transfers to other Keewatin communities. The framework for these sorts of transfers are now being reviewed.

There are other examples. In Broughton Island, we have recently done a full authority transfer agreement to allow the community to take over a road relocation project. Over and over again, we find that communities are capable of taking on these authorities and they are motivated to take them over. Thirty-six of the 52 community airports are already operated by communities. This is the first step towards full transfer.

Through all of these experiences, the message that is coming loudly and clearly from communities is that this government should continue to provide the communities with the authority to make their own decisions. In many cases, it is not the government that is saying, "Here, take this on." Communities are saying, "Give us that authority that is rightfully ours."

What would the honourable Members who are speaking about the risk and the concerns associated with community empowerment have me tell the mayors, the community leaders and the chiefs? What would those Members have me say when the northerners tell us to get the decision-making out of the offices and the boardrooms in Yellowknife where they have been made in the past, and have me tell those leaders, "No, you have to wait until we take you by the hand and show you how to do it."?

I think community empowerment is the right approach for the 90s and it is the right approach for the North. Again, I believe that our communities are capable. I think there are people in the communities that have the skill, and I believe they have the expertise. If they do not have that, they would acquire that expertise. Where it is necessary, they have the capacity to take on the training. Most important, I believe the communities have the leadership to do this.

Finally, I would like to say that now is the time to push ahead with the ideal that we have recognized and which have been needed for many, many years. Thank you.

---Applause

Is it still okay to make general comments?

Thank you. I know I already took the opportunity to make some general comments, but it was brought to my attention earlier today that when we talk about community empowerment, we should also talk about devolution and how Ottawa talks about devolving certain powers to the territorial government; whether we are responsible, whether we are able and whether we re capable as a government to take on certain responsibilities. That is what community empowerment is about as well. Maybe Ottawa has the same concerns that some people have about us empowering communities. Maybe they do not want to do it unless we raise our taxes. They have told us to raise more taxes and we will have more say, and things as such. I guess you have to look at the coin from both sides at all times. We are wrestling out there to get devolution from Ottawa. We are saying we have the capability of doing it and that we are willing and able to do it. Well, what I say is the communities have the capability. They are willing. They are able and we are here to assist them. Thank you.

Madam Chair, we had a motion on the floor earlier.