Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I am going to speak again today about something that I have brought up in this House before, and that is the purchasing policies of this government. Purchasing policies have been developed and implemented by the GNWT to provide incentive for the establishment and sustainability of northern businesses. With the advent of community empowerment, there was a shift to devolving responsibility to communities, band councils, local development corporations, et cetera, for the delivery of programs, services and capital projects. In this shift, my concern is with what happened to government policies such as the Business Incentive Policy and the Manufacturing Directive Policy. Has the enforcement or implementation of these policies been lost in this shuffle?
Northern businesses have made investments on the basis of these policies and now rely on happenstance to learn the projects and who is delivering them. I have said before in this House and I will say it again, every project funded directly and delivered on behalf of this government by various departments, local or regional governments, should be made known through a central information source such as a government Web site. Mr. Henry has spoken about the need to make Nunavut aware of what we have to offer by northern contractors, suppliers, and manufacturers, and I think this is a good idea. But before we run off to Nunavut, I submit to you, Mr. Speaker, that we need to make more efforts to make our own western communities, development corporation, government departments, and agencies aware of what we have to offer here in the North. Then we need to make sure that contracts funded by this government adhere to our own purchasing policies in order to realize maximum benefits from our limited government expenditures to northern businesses, and these northern businesses in turn employ northerners.
Hay River has a largely self-reliant manufacturing sector but yet, over and over again, I hear of government contracts going out specifying southern suppliers. Just today, I got another fax from another manufacturer in Hay River where it is not even left open. A southern supplier of a product which is manufactured here in the North is actually specified in a government contract. A call had to be made again to the deputy minister, to the regional people, and now this has been corrected. But the business only heard about this just by circumstance. This is not satisfactory.
We do have a limited number of capital dollars, and if we cannot take and make maximum benefit of these to the benefit of Northerners, well then we are not doing our job. I do not know how we can look further afield when we cannot even take care of making this information known and enforced right here in our own territory. Later on, I will have questions again for the Minister of Public Works and Services regarding this. Thank you.
--Applause