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.