Thank you, Mr. Chair. The motion here, I am going to not support the motion, as my colleague from Inuvik has moved it, and also Members that want to see a deletion here.
Mr. Chair, I beg to differ from the opinion of my colleague from Kam Lake. There is a lot of activity happening in the Sahtu region. There are about six or seven companies that are very interested just in oil and gas. There are diamond mine explorations that are happening there, so there is...Again, I could talk later on with my colleague here in terms of activity that has happened in the past. I just got off the phone with Husky Energy. They are looking at some activity happening next year in the Sahtu region. We saw what it is like in the region for the impacts. These are just small-scale projects that they are calling 10 or 13 million dollars small ones. For our community, that is very huge and very big. We certainly need their help.
In Inuvik, in 2004, we sent representatives to the Inuvik conference. That was what the conference was asking for, help from our government. Later on, I saw a conference happen in Norman Wells where MACA brought in a bunch of people also to other departments. They were asking for help. We don't do this. We leave them alone. There is no one there that is going to help our communities. They are going to be on their own. Did we do that down this way here when they had other activities happening? I don't know. Did we leave them alone to fend off with the diamond mines and other departments for impact benefits? I don't know. But we certainly listened to the people in my region to see the benefits of these impact advisors coming into our communities and working for us. I saw some of the work that has been done. I saw that it has been good work.
We are there to help the people. I think that is a good investment here of $300,000. It is peanuts compared to what is coming down the pipeline. People's lives. We just talked about one issue here in the orders of the day. We talked about the impacts of the one issue that we are
going to be dealing with. This socio-economic agreement is going to be dealing with our aboriginal governments, with the proponents, Mr. Chair. The benefits to the community far outweigh if we delete this funding here. The benefits, we are going to have more issues to deal with. By adding this in here, the benefits are going to be tremendous for our region.
Mr. Chair, the communities have been asking how do we get involved with the socio-economic agreements. How do we know when to kick our plans in? How do we work with these governments here? Mr. Chair, the timing of the pipeline, well, we could have a best guess as to when the pipeline is going to be built. You know how long it takes to be a journeyman, how many years. It is about four years. You go to school every day, hand in your reports and do the time. It is about four years to do it right on the button. If you drag, sort of take another year or so, these impact advisors can really help us in our communities in terms of preparing ourselves and getting ready to have this socio-economic agreement be honoured by Imperial and the proponents to this agreement. I am thinking here.
Mr. Chair, I think our communities deserve it. As for me, if we don't do this, we are going to throw them out to the wolves to fend for themselves. Some will do pretty good; some won't do so good. I am not sure as to why we want to have the deletion of this here. In 2004, the people asked us to help them. Now, in 2007, we are saying no, we are not going to help you anymore. So I want to say that to my Members here to really think this through. I won't be supporting the motion, Mr. Chair. Thank you.