Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would just like to follow up on the comments made by Mr. Miltenberger that this initiative is also receiving some attention in Yellowknife by the city fathers here. I attended a community leaders' conference, and this was the subject of discussion there: What exactly does community empowerment mean? At a follow-up meeting at which the other three Yellowknife MLAs also attended, it was again discussed, and there is no clear understanding of the implications of community empowerment and all the particular areas that could include. However, there does seem to be interest on the city of Yellowknife's part to participate in this if there are programs being considered to be transferred.
But to carry on with the comment made by Mr. Miltenberger, it would be tremendously helpful if we did have something in writing to explain exactly what community empowerment means and what particular programs we are talking about. I understand, of course, that MACA is the lead department, but what programs in the various other departments are affected by this, and what is envisioned to be affected?
So far, what I have seen is that we have announced that we are going to have community empowerment, and yet I think there is sort of an assumption that everybody loves this stuff. I don't disagree that perhaps people in the community love this stuff, but we need successes to go along with it, and we have to monitor that success as we go, as well. We can't just say, okay, we have a program of community empowerment; now, continue to do it. We have to be cautious that we don't get into this stuff and then two years down the line we have handed everything over and we've got nothing but disasters by people in the communities running these programs.
I think that we have to be, in my opinion, very careful about how we do community empowerment. I don't think we should take the attitude that you can just hand things over to people just because people ask for it and just because we say they should have it and that we are willing to hand it over to them. I think that would be irresponsible. We have to make sure that those programs that are handed over will run efficiently, continually and to the best of the needs of the people of the communities.
So I see a lot of areas here that, to me, are still quite blank. We don't have a published program. I don't think I've heard yet that there's this coordination at headquarters between departments about community empowerment and about transfer to communities of programs. So those are my comments, Mr. Chairman.