Mr. Chairman, if that is the proper wording, yes.

-- Laughter

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, my general comments on the overall report and Affirmative Action Policy itself, the existing one even. First of all, I have always been under the understanding that affirmative action policies in other parts of the country, including the States, was created primarily to address the shortfalls from minority groups. In other words, to address women and the lack of opportunities for aboriginal or coloured people. This is an interesting observation because I have been told time and time again that as an aboriginal person, I am one of the majority in this territory. That brings to my mind the question as to who is the minority? It would have to be those people that I am asking to recognize me.

There has always been a question in my mind whether affirmative action really addresses the problem. Are we in fact making opportunities for minority groups who, we have been told, is the aboriginals and the women's groups? I am not sure about the women, as far as their numbers versus men in the territories, but if we see, no doubt, the argument put forward that there are more men employed than women, then we have a justification for the policy. However, if we cannot confirm that as a majority group we do not have the majority number of aboriginals employed and we are the majority in this legislature are we really going to address this problem through affirmative action or is it some other shortfall that we are not particularly paying attention to here? That is one of my observations that I have many times had a problem with supporting affirmative action because of that particular point.

If we take that one step further and as an aboriginal person I sit back and I say to myself, well fine, they have recognized me, they have suggested that I am going to have preferential rights here, I would then have to ask myself, what is a northerner? This question has been asked many times before because then as an aboriginal person, I sit back, because I do not qualify as a northerner obviously. Because if I am an aboriginal person, then I am not a northerner. I sit back and I wonder and I watch people from outside the territory who cannot claim aboriginal rights to the territory creating special groups of people amongst themselves, special rights for themselves. Some would back that up with the argument, well, I was born here. The other ones would back up with the argument, well, I lived here for ten years. The other guy would say well, I have you beat, I have been here for 12 years.

Where do we draw this line? I cannot help remembering way back when Dome Petroleum addressed the same particular problem in the Beaufort Sea. They took this problem to what at that time was called the Beaufort Sea Committee to address how do we divide the work up in the Beaufort to address this particular problem. In other words, there were local people saying, we should have priority to the job, and then there was Inuvik saying, we should have priority to the job. Then it went all the way to Edmonton. The interesting part about this whole thing is that the natives themselves really did not define themselves as Dene, Inuit, Inuvialuit, Metis, we are all classed as aboriginals. There is only one class. No matter where you come from. From the southerners point of view, they created all kinds of classes. Obviously, the next question that is going to come up here is, fine, you are a northerner. You belong to the territories. Well, we have already seen in the Business Incentive Policy where belonging to the territories was not good enough. We decided to divide that into regions so that the guy living in the region has more benefits than the guy living outside the region. Where is this thing going to stop? We must take this into consideration.

I believe, personally, that a person should be judged on their merit. Whether they can do the job or not. That is all it should be based on because otherwise we are going to have a heck of a pile of classifications of people. Let me give you an example of how they tried to resolve this in the Beaufort Sea. I recall the specific problem was that a northerner, a guy who classified himself as a northerner, believed that he had just as much right to do business with Dome Petroleum as a native person does. They both lived in the same area. They both did the same job. His argument was that he should have just as much right to the job as the native. He said, although I live up in the area, I go south every year for a holiday, I do feel that I am entitled to equal right with the aboriginal person from Tuktoyaktuk.

I recall a fellow resolving it this way. He said in his observations that he compared these two people to a raven and a seagull. Now, we all know that the raven and seagull both do the same job. They both clean the dump. They work side by side. No problem. We also all know that the raven stays year round, no problem. What about that seagull? He flies south every year, then he comes back into a job again.

The interesting part about it is that no matter how many times the seagull came back, he never did become a crow or a raven. So the fellow decided, and it seemed to make sense, that there are differences amongst races that is nothing created by people, by man. They are created by somebody else and they should be recognized. Man made differences are very hard to address because they do not seem to be based on much except personal preferences and the ability to butter your own bread. We then turned this thing over to our very educated deputy minsters and administrators to try and resolve the problem to the satisfaction of everybody. Obviously this is never going to be done. I, for one, cannot see where a person from the south can justify calling himself a northerner just because he lives up here. Whether he is born here or lives here does not make him any different because if you really look at him, if he comes from Manitoba, for instance, he can always move back to Manitoba and have the same rights that he had when he left there. Why should he get special ones up here?

That question has to be addressed and I do not think we are going to resolve the Affirmative Action Policy problems. We are not going to resolve the problem of having more aboriginals in the work force except through what Mr. Erasmus has said time and time again, training and education and imparting onto our children that it is important that you go to work, it is important that you go to your job. The option of working and going hunting at the same time is gone. I enjoyed that option, but I have to tell my children it is not there for them any more. I would prefer to do that rather than to see my child hired simply because he is coloured. Simply because he is a native. I would be insulted if I was hired simply because I am a native. I think that we should be hired on our merits and nothing else and we would save a lot of time in this House and arguing with our Ministers and our deputy ministers about whether they are doing it properly or not. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is my impression that there are a lot of good recommendations here and especially with respect to improving the public service and the human resource sector that we have. As I said earlier, they are very valuable to us and we need to concentrate on them and improve and provide opportunities for them to improve. With regard to the affirmative action area, I do have questions and problems with certain areas. For instance, Mr. Henry also referred to the fact that representation is based on population rather than the labour force. I am not sure that you can go by, in my opinion, just general population and make it representative according to that because I am not sure we are going to get the number of qualified people to be able to fill the positions, but if you go according to at least identifying a labour force, then I think that makes statistically a lot more sense.

Also, in the area of representation, I have referred to that before, it is easy to have a blanket policy across the NWT government, but I think there are areas where we have succeeded in the government with representative labour force and there are other we do not but we need to analyze why we do not. We cannot just say, well, management should be made up of all women or all aboriginal. We need to address why they are not represented according to qualifications. There are areas where it is impossible to fill with northerners because we just do not have them. We do not have enough people that qualify in certain areas. You cannot tell me that you can fill doctors, lawyers, fire, medical, a lot of the technical positions. It will take years.

That leads me to my final point. I think this is all based upon getting our population up to speed with education and qualifications. Once we have that in our population, we heard statistics and we all know them. The education of a lot of our people is just not there. It is not there. So how can we say, well, we have to put these people into a lot of these positions. I think, when we get the qualifications for people, and Mr. Erasmus is a very good proponent for this, he keeps hammering away at the fact that we have to get our people up to speed on education. He is absolutely right. We have to get people up there. But I have a problem in that end when we deal with the affirmative action to generally say we have to have a representative work force when perhaps we do not have the qualified people in many areas. I break it down according to statistics. I do not have a breakdown so I have problems with this whole thing. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to say I congratulate the committee because it is good work in many areas here and the Cabinet should pay attention to a lot of these recommendations, but there are areas, as I say, that I have a problem with. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would just like to make a couple of concluding comments so that hopefully I am on record and very clear on this issue. About 30 years ago the government moved north from Ottawa and along with it came plane loads of people to run that government for us. Since that time, in my opinion, we have been on a quest for a responsible government. Part of that entails trying to achieve a representative work force which we are working towards. We are not there yet, but this report is another small step in that direction. If people will read this they will see that in fact merit is a key component. We are not talking about hiring people just because they are aboriginal women, regardless of their qualifications, just to have them in place as a token. I mean we are trying to do some very serious work and I think that should be recognized. To do that, we need structures that are supportive of that kind of process and we do need a workforce that is trained and educated. That is another whole area that we have to address.

Clearly, we still have work to do and I do not think anybody can deny that. To try to make demeaning comments about the work ethic of people because of who they are, I think has no place in this kind of debate. The north was built far long before civil servants came north by the people who lived here. They lived here for thousands of years and they did a fine job.

In fact, what we are trying to do I think is to make up for the mistakes made by people that came here with no clear understanding of what they were getting into in making decisions on behalf of people that they were not really, in my opinion, in hindsight, qualified to make. Now I think we are moving the right way and I hope Cabinet will receive this in the spirit in which it is intended. In fact, we think all people that live and work in the north here have a lot of capability, we just have to work with them to achieve that. Thank you.

-- Applause