Thank you, Mr. Chair and Members. I just want to raise one issue that I've been meaning to raise and, I'm sorry, I missed it when the page was up. It's in regards to emergency responsiveness. Because we have witnessed around the world a lot of catastrophic disaster such as the one we saw in New Orleans. I'm sure that something like that would not happen here, but I do recall discussing what will we do if something really dramatic happened where all our communication systems go down. My staff and I, we tried to look at, okay, where do we call, what do we do, just going from basic steps. All the information we were able to get are telephone numbers and things like that, but what if there are no phones working, and what if the cell phones are down? I don't know what would precipitate that. But if the power was out for a long time or something like that, I think 20, 30 years ago when that happened, there was talk of evacuating all Yellowknife residents, for example, to somewhere.
I think we are much bigger now, and I think an emergency response like that now has to contemplate something that goes back right to the basics, like thinking about where there are no phones, where people have to walk down the street and maybe every household has to know where to go. It should be for all the Territories, all communities. I would like to know that at least there's somebody in each community. For my riding of Range Lake, I don't know if everybody should go to the Range Lake School, or Tim Horton's. Then when you do go to wherever you're supposed to go to, that there are some emergency supplies. I would just like to be comforted that somebody's looking into that, and I'm not sure if we have that. I think we have enquired into that. I know we don't have 911, but that's contemplating a television service again. We don't have TV channels like in major cities. Radio station, maybe CBC. I mean, they have 24-hour coverage and they our local programming in the afternoon, but I don't know if the government has a contract with them to delve into that and make sure that people have a radio or TV that could be run by batteries. And how much water do you need? I think that the government should undertake at least designating who's responsible for each community, and I think we should explain to people what to do. There should be a 10-step thing, rather than giving them a number to call, or a web site to visit, because we have to contemplate situations where all the systems are down and we have to go back to the basics.
I know somebody in the department is working on this, and I'm just looking for the commitment from the Minister to pay attention to that, and perhaps report back to the House about what we can do. I'm noticing that the community emergency measures item actually is down on its money this year, so that's a little bit of a concern, too.
So if I could just get that commitment from the Minister. Thank you.