Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank the Members for their comments yesterday — comments of appreciation. We certainly welcome them, and it gives us some indication that we’re working along the lines the Members would like us to be paying attention to.

Of course, MACA has a very broad mandate, and there are a number of things we have embarked on in the last while. The biggest initiative that has taken a lot of energy and a lot of focus with our government in this department has been the New Deal. It’s been rolled out now for a short while, and it seems to be working well.

I know a lot of Members have raised concern about the smaller communities and their capacity. It’s something we’re also monitoring. We’re also working with the larger centres that have certain issues. We haven’t moved away from providing support. We don’t intend to move away; for the most part, we think things are going well. Communities are excited to be able to make decisions on their own without us interfering or having to put our stamp of approval on it. There’s a lot of work involved. There’s a lot of planning involved that communities hadn’t had to do up to now. Most of that stuff was done through our government and through this department.

The five-year plans are coming into place. There’s a lot of excitement over that, and there’s a lot of discussions happening. We have energy plans that need to be compiled. We have provided money to Arctic Energy Alliance to hire a community energy management coordinator who is working along with the communities.

Things seem to be on track. There was initially a presentation done to committee, and we had some good discussion and response about the concerns. A lot of concerns came forward. I was quite pleased we were able to compile that information and make some changes as to where we are heading.

We have a lot of concerns, as the Members do, over the issues in the area of youth. We felt that by re-profiling the positions in recreation, we could expand most of them to incorporate the responsibility for youth.

We didn’t get that same kind of sense that it was a good idea from the general public. Youth organizations felt that recreation workers, recreation development workers in the regions, should stay as they are. We heard the same kinds of comments from mostly the Members we talked to. As a result, we decided to change our approach and stay with the status quo and keep the

recreation development officers and refocus on the issue of youth.

A number of Members have raised it here today and yesterday. It is something we need to have a better approach on. We had some early discussions with the Northwest Territories Sport and Recreation Council. They are of the same opinion. I think there’s a real push from all avenues here to do something. We need, of course, to take a step back to see what that is and to see what resources we can put toward it. Hopefully, through the business planning we’ll have a better approach to deal with some of these issues. We still have significant investment through some of the departments, and there are a number of other departments that have also provided programs for youth.

There are issues around water that have been raised also — the reservoirs. In an attempt to look at the issue and meet the national standards, we have been looking at and upgrading water plants and, in a lot of cases, replacing them over the last five or six years now. I think we’ve almost dealt with every community that had issues. There are some that will be replaced this coming year. There are still four that were kind of dropped off the plan as we moved our capital to the communities. However, now with the Building Canada Fund, and if we can get the dollars approved, we anticipate that we’ll be able to deal with some of the last remaining four water plants, and that includes the two that were mentioned by the MLA for Nahendeh.

Mr. Ramsay had raised the issue about making tough decisions to reach our targets. It’s a very tough exercise, as everybody in this House knows, to look at reductions or re-profiling dollars.

We had, I think, a really tough challenge in front of us, and I was quite proud that our staff was able to deal with it. It was a very trying exercise, as most of our dollars flow to the communities — 80 per cent of our money goes to the communities. We have a lot of statutory obligations to meet, and we also had made some commitments through the New Deal that we had to support.

We have received the recommendations from the committee, and it recommended reintroducing a couple of the community development officers. We are looking at ways we can put that into the program and maximize our usage of those two positions.

We have, as Members know, reduced our School of Community Government staff from ten down to six. With those six positions, we have to focus our programs to the community governments and leave some of the other programs we were providing in the area of administration to other agencies and organizations such as Arctic College and others.

We would like, however, to use the two positions we’ve had for community development and combine them with the School of Community Government, which would bring our staff in that organization up to eight. At the same time, we would reclassify four of those eight to have additional responsibilities that would combine community development responsibilities and School of Community Government responsibilities and put those into the regions. That would leave us with four positions in Yellowknife and one in each of the regional centres of Inuvik, Norman Wells, Hay River and Fort Simpson. We feel that the community development officers — the new positions…. I don't know if we have reached an agreement as to what we're going to call them, but for the time being we're calling them community capacity development coordinators. They would have the responsibility of delivering training and also the community-development support the communities need.

The issue of volunteers has come up a number of times from the Yellowknife MLAs. Volunteer NWT, of course, has decided to close their doors. They were an agency that really worked well with us, as they were a point of contact. They were, of course, of good value. However, with the loss of the funding from the federal government, it was just financially impossible for them to continue. It’s a loss to us in the Northwest Territories. We need to find a way to deal with that. There are a number of initiatives that we had committed to support, and we’d like to do that. It was really tough to find any dollars internally, at a time we are reducing our budget, to incorporate a new program that we didn’t have historically. We didn’t get any new monies through the new initiatives for this except for a small amount of $10,000. Volunteer NWT had indicated to our staff that they needed, I think it was…. Well, they needed from us at least $130,000. They needed a lot more to operate. I think it was, overall, $250,000 or something closer to that amount. It was quite a gap from what we had to invest.

We still continue to provide support to volunteer initiatives internally. We still have a number of things we will continue to provide. We still have program dollars that can be applied for. Last year we had $20,000, and I think only $2,000 of that was applied for and utilized.

There is, as the Member for Tu Nedhe raised, still a lot of work we need to do with the band communities — the band governments and the communities that are classified as settlements. Right now the situation is that they can’t own property, and that is an issue for us as we move forward with the New Deal. We have been meeting with the settlements, and we have been meeting with the band councils. I think we have another one this coming week. We’ll have some in the immediate future. We’ve come together and looked

at options we can utilize. We still need to explore those further. We would like the band governments and the settlements to be on par with other communities, to be able to take advantage of the New Deal. As they are not in the position to own property, that requires us to hold it for them and also requires us to be part of the process. They need our agreement to make the necessary investment in capital, for sure.

We have been working with sport and rec over the years to look at the gym teachers and how we can incorporate them as part of our sport programs. We did have programs to provide some opportunity for the gym teachers to get further training. That is not something we can continue to provide.

There is still a desire from many of the sports organizations to take a step back and have all the organizations and the Sport and Rec Council review the mandate and review the games — the multi-sport games such as Arctic Winter Games, the Canada Games and those kind of events — and see if we are all in agreement on where we want to go next. We’d like to be able to get together and develop a strategic plan that would incorporate.... My own assessment is that we’re all looking toward putting more focus on communities.

I think a lot of the issues that were raised today and yesterday are very similar. I think the issue Mr. Krutko raised is something that needs some attention from this government. There are a number of communities in the Northwest Territories — I think it’s four; it may be five — that don’t have an easily accessible source of gravel. We need to work with the other departments to be able to do that.

We have combined, and provide on a regular basis, the gravel strategy that allows all the departments to work together — Public Works is the lead — to assess what the need is in the community and to work with Transportation or whoever so that if there’s going to be a crusher in the vicinity, there will be enough support for the crusher to allow every government department, including community governments, to purchase their gravel. The gravel resources are now flowing to the community as part of their revenues, and they can certainly take advantage of that. We just need to make sure the communities are in the loop, that they know when the crushers will be in the area or when there is a gravel-crushing program in the region.

There is something new, I guess, just recently. The federal program for disaster financial assistance has changed its rules a little bit to allow not only for repair of disaster areas but an allowance for mitigation. We’ll certainly check to see if that will provide any new dollars to the community of Aklavik and others that have been affected by floods and other disasters.

The issue of climate change, of course, has been raised again as an issue by a number of people, and it has been raised in the House during this session. We have, as part of our Building Canada Fund, put some dollars toward research and development in this area. We also have, as I mentioned before, a community energy coordinator, who will work with the community. This is a joint initiative with DOT to help the communities do a lot better planning and investment as we move forward.

I believe that’s all the comments I have regarding the opening comments.