Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just wanted to tell the Minister, in terms of the budget, there are some good things in the budget that I’m very happy to see in the budget, specifically that speak to the smaller communities and the challenges that they have to deal with day to day and some of the things that would be improving their lives, such as the Small Communities Employment Program, increasing the CHAP -- Community Harvesters Assistance Program -- the education program. Things like that will make a difference in my people’s lives.

I’m really glad to see that this government has implemented a program that will reduce the rate of electricity in my communities also to help reduce the cost of living. That’s a positive thing that this government can pat itself on the back and all of us in the Assembly can say. I’m going to be watching very closely as you go department by department and see how programs are going to be

implemented in the name of efficiency and effectiveness in terms of the operations of the government, because sometimes we might have some heated debate because sometimes it will come down to communities having the programs opted out for regional delivery or deliveries in larger centres.

That’s just what the Minister said in the finance book, Mr. Chair, that we live in a very vast land and all needs sometimes can’t be done in the communities. However, there are specific basic needs that need to be done in the communities and some of those needs are not being met right now for the safety and health of the people in the communities as we progress into a more modern society. I just want to make note of that to the Minister.

I do want to say that he’s put together fairly comprehensive areas that he needed to touch on that I feel has made some improvements, and I’m very happy that he’s listening. There are areas that, for example, I said Colville Lake certainly needs to be brought up to the standards of living in the Northwest Territories, such as other communities also do not have a nursing station with a qualified nurse. Sorry, they have nursing station health centres but they don’t have a qualified nurse there permanently. They have to fly them in from other communities. And you know what, Mr. Chair? When they fly in, they get off the plane and they go like this. They have to look at their time, look at the weather, are we going to be over-nighting here or not. That’s the reality. We should have a nurse going into Colville Lake or other communities, saying, I’m here for three days, I want to spend time and talk to people. But we have a system that feeds that type of services. It’s not servicing the people.

The same with the RCMP. We don’t have it in Colville Lake. They give us the stat and tell us when they visit and how long they visit. But we don’t have a system where people’s needs are being served. Mr. Chair, we need to really look at that, and that’s the difficult thing about this government here. How do we service the smaller communities where they see it, they hear it? They ask us MLAs, why does this community have this and we can’t have that? I know this government is doing its best to service people, but also in the budget we see where there are other programs that are in other communities. How come not ours?

Energy initiatives, we have a couple in the Sahtu that I am very happy to have, but those are studies. We don’t see any type of hydro facilities going into our communities. There are studies and studies. We don’t see any type of wood pellet initiatives going into our communities on large scales. We don’t see any type of initiatives such as geothermal or residual heat or anything like that. It is always good that we could have hydro, but we need to see

construction. We need to see something happening in our government facilities or our businesses.

It gets tiring after awhile to see where all the other initiatives are being spent. There are millions being spent in other communities. There are only a couple hundred thousand in the Sahtu. We are glad that you are going to look at it, but Deline has been studying hydro for 17 years. I think sometimes we need to ask these questions. I will be asking these questions to the Minister and put them on notice that we need to ask these questions and how they are going to make a difference in my community.

We need to look at areas that would really support our initiatives that we set out in our vision and goals. Those types of things I want to look at and see where they are going to make a difference. Like I said, when I went to Deline, Fort Good Hope, Colville Lake, Tulita and Norman Wells, one of the things that was really surprising is the people were talking about the empty houses in their community. Colville Lake has been over a year that we have had these empty houses, yet the highest core need. Could we not, as a government, get our staff, who are in the thousands in the GNWT, even within the Housing Corporation, come up with some policy that would get our people into these houses? Yet they are still sitting empty in Colville Lake with the highest core need in the study. Colville Lake, of all places, has three empty houses over a year. Unbelievable! Yet this government can’t take care of 134 people in that sense. That is what I am going to ask, those things that make a difference in our community.

In Deline people are being asked to leave their units. There are empty units in Tulita and in Deline. We had a really good meeting and meetings with the Minister of the Housing Corporation, with the leadership in Deline and Tulita, yet those houses are not being looked after. The bureaucracy is so unbelievable in terms of putting our good intents down. We have to do something that is simple that we get people into their houses, make them proud to be in the North, to be raised in the North, to go to school in the North. We have to get them off the dependency because a lot of them right now sit home collecting a cheque. We train them to get a cheque. They can go down to the income support with their bills and that is what they do. We haven’t given hope or inspired them to make a contribution to their community or to their family. We have all kinds of policies that block them.

In the Minister’s statement, we have Solomon Resources. I don’t know if that is an oversight or Solomon is not big enough to be mentioned. Also, Mrs. Groenewegen hasn’t seen what we have done up in the Sahtu. Solomon has started there. They are invested in the North. Most of it is done in the Yukon, by the way. We have a little bit going on there. Hopefully, in the future it will be more, if they

continue to invest more of the Chinese investments into Solomon. We have Naats’ihch’oh Park coming into effect. If the Tulita Groups sign on with the park and with Canada, that will bring millions of dollars into our region. Those kinds of things that we need to look at, I think, because in my region we need to be very aware of the difficulties and challenges we have. I want to thank the Minister for his budget.