I believe that you have to look at the economics of the Northwest Territories and see exactly the have and have-not communities. I think one thing that you can clearly illustrate in those statistics or information that’s out there, I think most of our communities we have employment that ranges from 12 to 13 percent of people that make a pretty decent income, and you know who those 12 to 13 percent are. Those are professional providers in our communities. It’s either the nurses, the teachers or the RCMP. That’s the makeup of the 10 or 13 percent of those jobs in our communities.

Now, you have 45 to 55 percent unemployment with people making under $30,000 a year, which is almost 50 percent of your population. Something tells you there’s something wrong with that picture. When you have the large regional centres where you have almost 50 percent of your population making over $100,000 a year, there’s something telling you that this government is stimulating those economies.

Government is an industry, government provides that basic service model as so-called jobs, and for ourselves in our communities that is what we’d like to see this government really focusing on.

I know that you’re going to talk about national standards and everything else, but my view is the Northwest Territories is unique, it’s different, we have regional centres throughout the Northwest Territories, we have cultural distribution of different cultures throughout the Northwest Territories, we have geographical challenges. So I think that we have to be realistic when we do these things.

I do not support the direction this government is going. I strongly feel that you have to really be, when we’re making these capital decisions, what are the social impacts on the rest of the Northwest Territories when we make the decision to establish a long-term care facility, take it out of a small community, and make sure to realize that is going

to have a long-term economic impact throughout the Northwest Territories, just not in those communities that are affected.

I’d like to ask the Minister, I know you mean well when you say you’re looking at home care workers, but those jobs don’t really pay as good as someone who is a caretaker in a long-term care facility or someone who is trained up to ensure you have a community health nurse on staff or the resources to assist those people. I’d like to ask the Minister why this government has not seriously contemplated the previous decisions of this government by looking at the demographic and population needs throughout the Northwest Territories and focus more on the need than the government continuing to grow at the regional centres and forgetting about the rest of the Northwest Territories.