Thank you, Mr. Chair. Every region in the territory is being pressured by resource development. It may not be today; it may not be tomorrow; but they are coming. If they are not coming, they are already here. You have seen the maps of leases that the World Wildlife Fund put out. We also know that the community boundaries are not the extent of what affects communities. The communities are tied to the land and the water. They have been since time immemorial, especially the aboriginal communities.
We know that there is one region that has taken the proactive step to try to come to an agreement with the federal and territorial governments on a land use plan. It has been a protracted negotiation but, at the end of the day, they are going to be the only region that will have a plan that identifies what is for development, what is for communities, what is for resource development and what is protected.
We are slowly, in a fragmented way, setting pieces in place that we can carry that process on into the 16th Assembly in macroeconomic policy. For example, they are supposed to give us a framework to be able to do that. We know that there is more than a pipeline coming down the valley. We met with the green corridor folks last week. They are saying part of the national impetus for this green power grid and corridor is to try to get 3,000 megawatts off the Mackenzie River, which means up by Inuvik. So you tack that on to the proposed pipeline, the timelines are 12 years for the dam on the Slave if they go ahead. So there are things happening. As the Member for the Sahtu said,
there are companies in his riding as we speak wanting to explore, get ready for potential pipeline and once Imperial Oil is out of the picture or they fish or cut bait, the pipeline will be built because it is just too valuable a resource not to. The issue of being able to assess cumulative impact which we can't do as a territorial government, the issue of land use planning, which we have not formally set a path on yet, has to be done. These types of resources give us a leg up to do that. We have to look past this little supp, look down the road to the 16th Assembly and beyond and recognize that we can't always be playing catch up and we have to try and get ahead of this. Maybe we are not as well organized as we should be, but we have to keep working on that and recognize that we are going to get organized. To do that, we need resources.
I would suggest to you as well, there are areas where we are going to continue to need resources. If we are worried about the size of public service, there are ways to look internally at efficiencies and staff that aren't really doing the job. I would suggest to you that there are probably 10 to 15 percent of government staff that if deputy ministers were given the thumbs up, they would be able to replace or do without, but we don't because it is so difficult to get rid of people. So let's not cut off our nose despite our face because we want to keep the size of the public service down. The only way we are going to do it is to limit our ability to effectively deal with what is coming our way in terms of the resource development, the environmental impacts and the impacts on the basin, all of which we have not been able to determine or quantify. If we don't do that soon, then we will never do it and we will always be playing catch up.
Mr. Speaker, I would vote and encourage people to try to take a long view here and, yes, there is a zero-based review coming. In the meantime, there are also these other very pressing issues, structural issues, assessment issues, that we have to get ready for. It is going to be a fundamental issue in the next Assembly that we are going to have to deal with these issues. There are some of the pieces in place, but they are not there yet. This is one of the pieces. So I will be supporting this motion. Thank you.