Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yesterday I listened to the Premier, and in his sessional statement he talked about the Northwest Territories and he made reference to the Assembly goals that we were going to try to achieve through this Assembly. He mentioned two of them: healthy, educated people and one of the other goals was an environment that will sustain the present and future generations of our people.
Mr. Speaker, I fully support these goals, but how do we get to them? Well, there is a means that we can achieve them. Mr. Speaker, by doing some research from the NWT Bureau of Statistics, it shows that in our communities in the Sahtu our traditional activities are heavily supported by our people in the manner that people live off the land, they hunt and fish, they trap and use country foods. Mr. Speaker, it’s very high in our communities in regard to the numbers that show up in the stats of people that go out on the land to practice the tradition to live their culture and to teach and to educate their children about the land. These values are very strongly supported, as these numbers indicate.
Also, Mr. Speaker, the number of young people in our region is very high. In the entire Sahtu region, Mr. Speaker, 45 percent of our population is under 25 years of age and, Mr. Speaker, you know that the Sahtu has only seasonal jobs up to six months at best and people with low... The economic wage salary scale is way down. There’s a high percentage of families with less than $30,000 of income coming in per year. So a lot of people rely on country foods, rely on the land. So I want to ask the Premier, when questions are asked, about what type of programs will the government do to support trappers and hunters and families to go out and live on the land, to support them due to the high cost of living we have in the Sahtu region. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.