Thank you, Madam Chair. I wasn't going to really speak on this because I went through this in the 13th Assembly. I will tell you back then is exactly what we see today happening with our rural and remote communities with programs and services, the have and have-not communities. It's exactly what we were afraid was going to happen when they had the court case.
I don't think you can say there is a difference between the larger centres and small communities. The little things the large centres take for granted like being able to get access to medical care, policing services, basic infrastructure and whatnot, most communities today cannot even get the basic services in a lot of our communities. We talk about policing a place like Sachs Harbour. We can have increased budgets for highway patrols, we can have police dogs that we budget for, yet we can't even find the fundamental basic services for people who are at a point where they are leaving our communities because the services they have there are secondary to what is going on in the larger centres.
Families are leaving our communities because of the quality of programs and services being delivered because of the adjustment of what was done in the 13th Assembly. You can talk about representation by population, but you also have to realize when you talk about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that you are talking about a quality of life issue here that no one seems to want to touch but it is the reality of the North. The whole demographics of what happened in the Northwest Territories from the 13th Assembly where a majority of people in this House were from small isolated communities from Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. We were able to help people from Grise Fiord and ensure that they had the equipment to run their municipal services and programs. We were able to deal with the services that were being delivered.
Since this court decision, in which we gave seven seats to the larger centres, we have seen a decline in the services that we can deliver in a lot of our smaller communities because of capacity issues. Everyone is moving to where the opportunities are. The quality of education is better in the larger communities. The services are better in the larger communities. I know my colleague from Inuvik Boot Lake touched on the thing about medical services. In most of our communities, the only service you get is to be medevaced to Yellowknife or Inuvik. That's about as close to the medical services we are getting. To see a doctor, you might be lucky to get your name on a list to see a doctor once a month.