Mr. Chair, the reason I raise the question is because I’ve been working on projects in my riding, regardless if it’s looking at shoreline erosion for Aklavik or main street chipseal for Fort McPherson or some sort of youth centre for Aklavik or even an outdoor skating rink, but it seems like that corporate knowledge is no longer at the regional level. I mean, either through retirement and whatnot. But yet a lot of this information is still compiled at headquarters. I think that you have to find a way to improve the relationship between communities and not say, well, sorry, we gave you the money, that’s the end of it; we’ll wipe our hands of you and walk away. For me, you still have a fundamental role to play because you have the corporate knowledge that those communities need so that they have the information so when they consider things such as shoreline erosion, which the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs was responsible for the last time they did any major work on shoreline erosion for Aklavik, that information is still at headquarters.

The same thing in regard to the main street chipseal program for Fort McPherson. Again, the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs along with the Department of Transportation did a study in nine communities. Again, that corporate

knowledge is at headquarters. I think we have to find a way of getting that information and getting the resources and the people that have that knowledge or basically have that information. It’s easy to access from the community level and not have to call headquarters or talk to somebody at the regional office who does not know what you’re talking about or has never had the experience or has the knowledge of what happened in the past. I think it’s important and that’s something that has to be considered by headquarters and, more importantly, these positions cannot just simply stay at headquarters. There has to be that process of ensuring that you have dialogue with the communities, with regions and, more importantly, help them build that capacity and, more importantly, have that information so that when they do develop a proposal or whatnot, that the information is there that a lot of money has been spent already so that we don’t have to redo all that research and development all over again. So again, I think the department has to re-look at these positions and, more importantly, find a way to get them closer to communities, especially down to the regional level.