Thank you,
Mr. Chairman. Just briefly I’d like to speak to the issue of tourism and the environment. It’s dear to the heart of many of the people that I’ve heard speak in this House. We talk about the need to get people on the land. We talk about the need to promote renewable resource industries that are going to take away the focus from oil and gas and minerals and all the other extraction activities that leave such a big footprint on the land.
The tourism piece, the parks piece is probably the most undernourished part of the government that we have. It’s always been cut. It’s always been ignored, because there are other priorities. We’ve reached a point, like we have in a lot of other cases, where we have an accrued infrastructure deficit here.
We also have an opportunity. We’ve been talking for years about the Protected Areas Strategy. We’ve been talking to the federal government, about the federal government, complaining about the process. We finally have some money in the budget — territorial money in the territorial budget — to look at a protected area park, the first one in the Northwest Territories. Wrigley is in line for that type of consideration, yet we’re going to turn our back on it to make some kind of political statement that has been made a number of times already in this House.
The issue before us is: what value do we place on our parks? What value do we place on the environment, that we all speak so much about, and at what cost are we going to ignore it? I would encourage folks to reconsider this. I mean, this doesn’t come this way very often. We’ve been waiting, in many cases years. The fact that we will finally be able to stand up and look people in the eye that we’ve put money into a protected area park would be something that is long, long overdue.
We have the legislation. We have the programs. We never put in any money, and we never use the tools to do that. So what statement are we making about the value we place on that type of activity? I think it’s worth while to proceed with those, and I would encourage Members to consider that.