Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to just speak briefly to this motion, as lead Minister of the Reducing the Cost of Living Strategic Initiative. I appreciate the intention behind the motion and agree with the Members that we need to make sure that our children get every opportunity to grow up healthy and strong. As a government we believe that all of our residents should be able to meet their basic needs and already have many programs that help ensure this.

At the same time, Mr. Speaker, we know that economic pressures on our residents are increasing, and we welcome the opportunity to work with Members on actions that will help people over the long term. The government is committed to working on reducing the cost of living, and we made this a focus of our strategic initiatives. We do recognize our high cost of living makes it difficult for some of our people to meet their needs. We also recognize that there are differences in cost between our communities, and that threatens the sustainability of some of our more remote and small communities. We do want to take steps that will help reduce these differences and ensure that NWT residents have fair and equitable access to the most basic necessities where they live.

Mr. Speaker, I think it should be noted that the GNWT also supports programs that ensure our children have access to nutritious and healthy food regardless of need. One example is the Department of ECE’s Healthy Children Initiative, which provides funding to community based child development programs. In 2007 and 2008 this initiative provided just over $1.6 million to support child development centres, preschools, daycares and other early childhood programs that often serve nutritious snacks to children in communities across the NWT. ECE also provides funding to help licensed daycares and day homes purchase food for healthy snacks and meals. In 2007 and 2008 there were 117 licensed programs caring for 1,768 children up to the age of 11. In total, Income Security spends

$17 million a year on food, shelter, utilities and clothing, and we saw an increase of that just last year.

Mr. Speaker, we do support the intent of the motion, but we do want to look at whether milk should be the one that should be subsidized, whether it should be a subsidy. We are willing to review that. Not everyone drinks milk. There might be other things, and it’s not part of a traditional diet in every community either. So if there are other alternatives that we could look at, we want to look at that.

Also, we want to look at the fact that the cost of living is determined by many independent and other factors, such as transportation of goods. Subsidy at the end of the supply chain is not always the best way to deal with the cost of living. So as the lead Minister of the strategic initiative committee, I’d like to tell the Members that we will review this and we will continue to work at other ways of reducing the cost of living in the long run. Also, as this is a recommendation to the government, Cabinet will be abstaining from the motion.