Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have comments for the Minister and his opening comments. Most of the communities, when we go out to communities, always have some issues. I think we are involving community governments

where community governments want to have more control. I think this government and this department is doing that in terms of involving more authority to the community governments. One of the unique things about the community governments is that they have band governments also. You get into that issue of authority and jurisdiction. Some communities have band governments. Some of them have MACA governments and then there are land...(inaudible)...governments. I think this department is doing a good job in terms of how we work together. I continue to support them in terms of putting together some good policies, some good legislation in terms of how you increase the authority. I think the funding itself, I think it says in here a percentage of, I think it is $71.1 million going to grants and contributions to communities. That is a really good amount going straight to the government. Certainly other government departments should take heed of this arrangement. I don’t think we will get across right away.

Mr. Chairman, the real issue I want to talk about is the presentation by the Minister. He is going to look at new regional officer positions. I want to say that I applaud that initiative to get that into the business plans, get the funding and start looking at putting this program in place.

In the Sahtu region, 45 percent of our population is 25 years and younger. We desperately need this position. I really wanted to say I hope we could really do some good work with this new position here. We have a high population of young people. We want to do a lot of good things. I look forward to this position being staffed and up and ready once we get everything in place here.

I want to say the youth centres that the Minister talked about here are welcome in my communities. The one issue that I want to talk to the Minister about is in Deline they built a youth centre that came from community contributions from an old trailer. I am not too sure what kind of funding came from MACA to support them. I watched them bring an old trailer in. They made the gravel. They made the time, effort and it was all done by community initiatives. I think that when we do funding for youth centres, make sure it is fair across the board. One community gets one. Everyone should have an access to get funding. I want to raise that because the people in Deline were looking at youth centres, but they didn’t wait until the government came. They just went and dragged the old building down and got the gravel for it and they got skilled tradespeople to hook up the plumbing and electrical and painting and that. Now it is being widely used by the community. It is something that all youth centres should be treated equally across the North.

I am interested in the after school program. The Minister indicated 18 pilot projects. I wouldn’t mind a copy of that, a list of all of them. At least I have it.

I just haven’t researched it in the communities. I also look forward to seeing the completion of the communities’ energy plan and see where they are. I think the Minister already gave us a copy of that paper, so I have to look again. It is amazing here. However, I look at how closely these energy plans will get done.

The other one I want to talk about is the Highway Rescue Services Program. I know there is some ground ambulance assistance to some of the communities around all-weather roads, but my communities are all on winter roads. I am not too sure if we settled this issue on who is responsible in terms of if there is an accident on the road, if someone from the community goes out because that is what they do, that is just the right thing to do, or is it coordinated through Health, RCMP or outside municipal boundaries? I’m not too sure if that’s been settled. I know the Town of Norman Wells wanted to look at the ground ambulance rescue, but we weren’t in that discussion yet. Now it’s coming out. Even the Town of Norman Wells wants to know if they should get a ground ambulance. They don’t know. They were quite concerned about that. I’ll be looking forward to some discussion on that.

I want to tell the Minister that when his staff did some work on the Mackenzie Gas Project community profiles and all the assessments, they did a really good job. They put together some good information for us on my communities that are going to be affected by the right-of-way of the pipeline. Excellent work. I think that work should continue. Continue working with our community members on the potential impacts to the community. I think that this department did a really good job on that.

The decision that the government is going to look at Colville Lake becoming a First Nation government, I was talking to the band manager and they’re pretty excited. I look forward to this government looking at increasing government authority and how to work with Colville Lake, start the funding arrangements and improving their staffing skills. Like any other community, it took quite a lot of efforts on both sides to get to where they are today.

The last point I wanted to raise is one of the goals of the department says to support communities in their efforts to provide a safe, healthy, and vibrant environment for their residents. I underline “safe” and “healthy” for the amount of dust we have in our communities. I wanted to let the Minister know that we hope he’s heard enough to work it in the budget to chipseal the communities. It’s been a longstanding issue. When you give the communities the authority to choose their projects, and certainly there’s not enough money for all the projects they have, even our water treatment plants. We’re not able to maintain that. The filters

are from the States, the machines are from overseas. It’s just really difficult to have our own in for the water treatment plant. I’m not even sure if we’re up to code in terms of the Drinking Water Quality Framework. That’s a lot of work there. Things like that, when you give something to the community, things that they lack for so long, they’re going to go through some difficult processes as to what do they do and what do they get. So I think the dust control could be an issue that should be considered going back to the government or the government helping the communities get a good dust control or paving program. Especially for the people. I’ve gone into the communities, sat down to have tea with them, and there certainly is a lot of dust in the house. People complain about that. Especially the older people who have difficulties. They have to always change their filters. It costs a lot. They always talk about doing something about the dust. So you have difficulties with their own local governments and our own territorial government on who should do it. It goes back and forth. I hope we can work on something like that.

I have more questions to the Minister as we go to the details.