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.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Next on my list is Mr. Menicoche.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to raise a few issues, as I travelled around my constituency. A couple of my communities still have capacity problems. They still have problems managing the money that’s delivered to the communities. I think certainly part of their issues is that a lot of the planning is specialized stuff. It requires engineers for buildings. Particularly in the community of Wrigley where they’re telling me that they have the money but planning is specialized. They have to talk to engineers and pay all that additional cost. It’s kind of not fair to the community if you really think about it. That’s some of the issues that they’re looking at in particular with capacity issues.

As well, assistance in the community when they lack a finance officer. I think what’s important for me is for the department to know that right away and get a handle on how the community is spending money. We’re still responsible for the money that we give them and if we don’t act quickly, then the future of the community, it just hurts them. I think we do have a responsibility to continue to assist communities in that way.

With respect to us concentrating on youth funding, certainly I concur with my colleagues. I think we’re heading in the right direction with that. Just out of a particular interest, in the Minister’s opening statement he’s talking about a pilot program to promote physical activity for purchasing much-needed sports equipment. I’m not too sure which communities are on the list for these pilot programs,

but I do want to mention that I did get a recent letter from the community of Wrigley asking for volleyballs and basketballs. I’m not too sure why the community doesn’t have those right now. But if I can put in a plug for the community of Wrigley, I think that community should be assessed in terms of those needs. I don’t know if the Minister can make a note there and follow up with me on that. I certainly would like to support that community if indeed there is a lack of equipment and it means there’s a lack of activities happening not only for the youth but also for the community.

As well, some of the smaller communities were able to get some of the community capacity funds and access some of the stimulus programming and I’m pleased about that. But I think that more can be done for the communities. I’m for also providing as much resources as we can. I don’t know about this fiscal year, but certainly we should try something the following fiscal year. If we can call that a pilot project, let’s do that, because there’s some products out there that can be viewed as a cheaper alternative. It will help with the dust in the communities.

In terms of the community public infrastructure I know that the community of Fort Liard has spent a lot of its previous resources on the community youth centre and they do need assistance with getting theirs up and running. I know that we’re providing some resources. I’m supportive of our youth centre programming dollars that are there. I’m also supportive if and when communities are eligible for special projects, such as in other ridings of building a new youth centre, that we should do it. But all available efforts must be used to assess, of course, the best way that they can do it. I’m in favour of some communities getting their special projects, but at the same time we should try to allow opportunities for other communities and other regions to access that type of funding. We’re well aware that we cannot do all communities at the same time. The government’s always pressed for funds, but at the same time a fair share of resources should go to all communities in the region. With that, Mr. Chairman, mahsi.

Any more general comments? Is everybody agreed that there are no further general comments?

With that, I will give the Minister the opportunity to respond to general comments. Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There was a wide range of concerns raised, but I think for the most part, all of the Members had the same concerns. I am going to go down the list here and try to speak to as many of them as I can. We will obviously have an

opportunity when we get into detail to ask individual questions on each individual area.

We do appreciate some of the good comments we have been hearing as far as some of the work that MACA is doing, some of the investment in youth. Obviously, it is a priority with this department and with the government. We are starting to see a lot more money allocated in the youth areas in the last few years. We would be willing to provide a list of communities that are receiving monies under the pilot program. We can do that, so I think that just about every community in the Territories is covered to a certain extent, so they will all benefit from this money.

One of the things that we keep hearing is -- and I think Mr. Krutko started it and then just about every Member spoke to it -- was about the capacity in the communities and that is obviously an issue and is one we are taking steps with LGANT and NWTAC to deal with and we are looking to see some positive results. This is a program that is just starting to roll out, so I think that within a year or two we will see more homegrown SAOs, more homegrown administrators, so we are looking for some positive results of that.

As far as allocating the money goes to the communities, we allocate the bulk of our money on a base plus, which is fair to communities. They will all get a base and then they will get plus based on population, so it works out well for them and the communities are receiving a lot of money. Just in the experience that I have had just since I took over the portfolio, the communities are really pleased with them having the ability and the authority to make these decisions as to what is good for them. It kind of takes it out of our hands a bit as an Assembly and it goes into the hands of the community, but that is the way it should be because we are here at the pleasure of the residents out there. There is still some capacity challenges, we will admit that, but for the most part I think that this has been a positive experience for the communities.

We talk about youth centres and you have some communities identifying that as a priority in their community. Mr. Jacobson mentioned it before when we visited the youth centre in Paulatuk. That was done strictly by Paulatuk, for Paulatuk, and they take a lot of pride in that. I think we are going to see more like that. We have some communities identifying some of the dollars that they are getting through some of the federal programs geared towards youth centres and they are trying to match some of the funding or put some of their own infrastructure money into it, which is a good thing. We hear lots of concerns with dust control. It is a concern that we share, but the communities now have it within, and they are starting to realize that if dust control is a priority in their community, then

they can allocate some of their infrastructure money towards that and we are starting to see more and more of that. We keep in close contact with the community, we see some of the programs that they are planning on, we work with them on their infrastructure plans, so we have an idea what they identify as priorities and we are starting to see a few more of the communities identifying dust control as a priority and starting to make an investment in that regard.

I think Mr. Yakeleya asked a question or somebody asked a question about where these positions are going. It might have been Mr. Jacobson that was asking. I think that as we go into detail, you will start to see where some of these positions are going into.

We appreciate the comments on stable funding for the multisport games. Obviously, there are still some questions that are going to be asked as far as that goes. Someone spoke about the opportunities for youth, and we obviously can’t solve all the social problems in the NWT as a department but we can work with the communities and the communities allocate resources to build infrastructure that the youth can take advantage of. I think we are starting to see more and more that. I see in my travels around, that the communities are really putting a high priority on programming for their youth.

We have a lot of things going on for the youth throughout the department and I think it was Ms. Bisaro was speaking that she was concerned with the coordination of all the money. I will be doing a Minister’s statement on it in a couple of days, but there is a new website that has been launched. It is called proud2bNWT. This is actually an excellent resource for any youth that is out there looking to find youth money government wide. I think it is geared more toward MACA but it has... We have had some really good feedback. I have spoken to some teachers and students that took it upon themselves one day to check it out while they were in the classroom. We have had some really good feedback on that, so hopefully this will be a new tool that they can use out there, just to go onto this website; it is “proud2bNWT.” I see Ms. Bisaro writing. This was just launched I think about a month ago and this is one that is already getting some good positive comments back.

This is another tool that we can provide to the youth and people that work with the youth. We have youth ambassadors, I think, and we are posting some photos on there. They are putting on blogs of their experiences in Vancouver, so this is one that we are looking forward to.

The increase, there were a couple of Members that had some concerns with the 6 percent increase but we can tell you right now that the bulk of that money went to the community governments. We have heard from the community governments that

they are having issues with O and M. Their costs are getting higher, so we have taken steps to address that and that is the reason for part of the increase and most of the money is going to the community governments. I am sure we will have more questions as we get into more detail. I have tried to touch broadly across this.

The energy sustainability plans, the integrated community, there was... I think Mr. Krutko had asked some questions about who had done what and we do know that the bulk of the communities have completed most of their plans, a lot of the communities are just in the... Okay, we have 10 communities completed, we have 13 communities that are just waiting council approval and then we have 10 that council will approve in March, so we are quite confident that as of March 31st , all

communities will have their plans in. We are looking forward to that and we will obviously update Members of the committee as to the progress of that.

I think, Mr. Chairman, that I have basically covered the main points that were raised and I don’t want to take up too much of the time, but I am sure that as we get into details, Members will have questions on each individual department within MACA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Is there a chance we can get a copy of that information in regards to the number of communities that have energy plans and whatnot and we can circulate that to the Members? Mr. Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We can provide that to the Members. I’ve also, I think, made a commitment to provide a list of some of the communities that were getting the pilot project money. So we’ll provide those two pieces of information to Members. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. I’d just like to ask the House if they want to go into detail.

Okay. We can move to page 6-7, department summary. With that, we’ll defer until we have considered detail. So if we can move to the following page. Does committee agree to defer?

Information item, page 6-8, Municipal and Community Affairs, infrastructure investment summary. Any questions? Agreed?

Moving on to page 6-9, Municipal and Community Affairs, information item, revenue summary. Any questions? Mr. Yakeleya.

One question I have is on the lottery licence. The majority of the funding going into these sports field in terms of the funds that we raise through the lottery licence and the dollars that the majority go to support multisport across the North.

Minister of MACA.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Member is correct; all that money goes towards supporting sport in the Northwest Territories.

Page 6-9, Municipal and Community Affairs, information item, revenue summary.

Moving on. Mr. Miltenberger, did you have a question? Moving on to page 6-10, Municipal and Community Affairs, information item, active position summary. Mr. Yakeleya.

I’m just going to make the presumption that the increase of positions is this three officer youth positions.

Minister of MACA.