Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to thank the Premier for his sessional statement, as well. In my own priorities for what I thought that the government should be doing during the upcoming strategic planning process, I would like the government to look at targeting various areas across the Territories. Some of the main areas that I would like to see targeted, for example, in our goal of having healthy and educated people across the territory, I have always felt that it would be a task that would be difficult to achieve, that we are trying to target everybody across the Territories from the very young of our population to the elders. I think that if we just target too many groups or just target everyone, it is almost like a statement that the Premier made. If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. So that is my same feeling towards the way that we would be targeting the people to try to create a healthy and well-educated population across the Territories.

I feel that if we concentrate on creating a healthy and well-educated group of youth, then we would actually be achieving some of that objective. I think that, as far as the youth go, in addition to trying to educate them, I think that it is important that this government actually takes a look at some of the smaller communities where it is very difficult to provide youth infrastructure such as swimming pools, which is apparently very costly to operate, artificial ice which is very costly to operate, costly to bring in as infrastructure, but some of the things that government could be looking at is maybe some small infrastructure items, enhancing programs and services in the community, youth counseling and providing youth workers right across the territory where people are concentrating on working with the youth and working with programs. I see that now a majority of the people that are working with the youth across the territory are RCMP officers and teachers. We had a situation in one of the communities. I was talking to one of my friends. He indicated he was the only parent volunteer in a group of people trying to start up soccer teams, basketball teams and volleyball teams in one of the smaller communities and every other adult in the group there was either an RCMP officer or teacher. That’s a positive thing, I guess, for individuals that come to work in communities and start to work with the youth and so on.

I would like to see the government make a concentrated effort on reducing the cost of living across the territory. I

think again that it’s important that we end up targeting some items that maybe the government could subsidize to help some of the communities where we have the lowest employment, lowest average income, we have the highest cost of living, so that’s kind of backwards somehow. If individuals in those communities are lucky enough to be in homeownership, then most of their income goes towards operating the home and so on. So I find that kind of strange that the cost of living…I understand that it’s a transportation issue and so on. It’s not that I don’t understand why that exists, but I don’t understand why the government would allow it to continue on for so long without trying to address some of those areas where much needed food items like milk, for example, is something that most families can’t afford. Starting right at the beginning of their life with small children, as soon as they are able to advance from drinking only milk which is very healthy for them, they get into other things like Kool-Aid and that’s not good for the population. The youth population starts off not as healthy as maybe they should be. Maybe the government could look at some sort of programs like that.

I think it’s important also that the Government of the Northwest Territories assist in the process of ensuring that the land resource and self-government negotiations are completed in a timely manner, and that they work with both to be a conduit to try to make sure these land resource and self-government negotiations are completed and that the Government of the Northwest Territories is seen as a government that wants to see these negotiations completed. Sometimes in the smaller communities they aren’t seen as that. It would be good if the government could move to trying to complete the negotiations in land resource and self-government areas.

In the area of self-government, I felt that in the community and a lot of the responsibility of the Government of the Northwest Territories, there are various ways that the Government of the Northwest Territories would be able to try to complete the self-government negotiations with the communities. I have talked about decentralization of positions from the GNWT into the communities. I recognize, however, there are housing issues. It’s difficult just to house essential staff that we have in the communities like nurses and teachers and so on. So when we bring in other staff into these communities, that could become a challenge. I think this is a challenge that could be met by this government, by the government delegating some of the decision-making and ultimately devolving the decision-making to the communities once the options are in the communities and the positions are reporting to the local aboriginal governments or the community governments.

I feel the Northwest Territories government has a major infrastructure problem. Some of the things we spoke of today in the House with the infrastructure problems in the school, infrastructure problems with the highways and so on, I think the government has to take a serious look at actually borrowing some more money onto advancing some of the debt wall predictions that are further down the line, maybe five or six years down the line, and move that up before repairing the infrastructure costs double. Right now, there’s an indication that the infrastructure inflation rate is about 20 percent. So every project that we hold back for five years is going to double in cost, so I think it’s important that the government make the decision now and weigh the benefits of doing the infrastructure now,

borrowing the money now, paying the interest on that now versus waiting and paying the extremely high inflation cost on infrastructure development.

I feel that local employment -- Ms. Bisaro just mentioned apprenticeships -- is a key to trying to create some employment at the small community level. I recognize the difficulties in creating apprenticeships, getting people into apprenticeships. I think the Department of Education could do a lot of work in that area.

Some of the items I just want to touch on briefly --, I don’t have a lot of time left -- there are housing issues. I believe that housing issues can be addressed by going back to targeting the groups of individuals, whether they be seniors, single households, families and so on. It doesn’t do much for the core need if we are addressing family issues when the core need for family issues is lower than, for example, other groups that we are ignoring like singles and seniors. I think that traditional economies, seniors, and the idea of taking a look at zero-based review on infrastructure and O and M are probably things that the government could look at in the future, as well. Mahsi. Thank you.

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