This would be true for the GNWT. If we did not sign the agreement-in-principle, we would not have access to the $4 million that would help us in the transition work going into negotiations. We will have to come up with our money in negotiations as a Government of the Northwest Territories. The federal government has set up $3.9 million for Aboriginal governments to prepare for the work and the transition into negotiations. As they sign that, they will have to sit down with the federal government to work out that funding arrangement. Thank you.

Thank you. Can the Premier explain where the thousands of dollars that have been given to the regions went if it wasn’t to explain the devolution?

The Member is asking the GNWT to explain where that money went. That was co-funded by the GNWT and the federal government. If I understood your question correctly, I hope that it went towards the work on devolution, the prepatory meetings, some of the negotiations specifically.

In the life of our government, we’ve got a number of agreements in place. One at the regional leaders’ level, which helps bring them into the regional leaders’ meeting, supports two at a time. Then specifically within the Executive there were agreements in place to help fund the devolution meetings, and that was to help the groups organize and structure and review the materials that they needed to review. We’d have to go to the groups to find out exactly how they deal with those funds. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Final supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Can the Premier tell me as to why the AIP wasn’t released earlier in terms of letting the people understand and read it, rather than being posted on the CBC website? Just recently it was released to the public.

Thank you. First and foremost, the process that’s been well established within the Northwest Territories right from self-government talks, land claim talks to this agreement-in-principle, the parties have been involved. Aboriginal governments and groups have been involved in this process. They’ve had their hands on the document for years. The specific document that was signed off by the chief negotiators and the letter sent to myself and Minister Duncan and additional letters were also

sent to all the regional leaders in September. So we were waiting for their response through October and looking at it on a going-forward basis as we were preparing to get ready to inform the people of the Northwest Territories what this deal would mean and how we would go forward.

Again, this is an agreement-in-principle. It is a non-binding agreement that sets the framework for going forward to final negotiations. Now we’re starting to do our process and get the message out to the people of the North. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. The honourable Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are addressed to the Premier and I’d like to follow up on my statement about the Anti-Poverty Strategy. I want to follow up on the report which went to the government last December from the workshop that was held in October.

I know that there is a GNWT working group that has been established and I also know that it does not include any representatives from outside of government, that there are no representatives from the Anti-Poverty Alliance. I know there is an advisory body but that body is not involved as part of the working group.

So I’d like to ask the Premier why, on the part of the government, why there is this reticence to involve the Anti-Poverty Alliance in developing the Anti-Poverty Strategy. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. The honourable Premier, Mr. Roland.

Thanks to the Premier. I have to disagree. I think the original Anti-Poverty Alliance is a large group, but it’s not all of the members of the Anti-Poverty Alliance who needed to be on the government’s working group. They certainly would have been happy with a couple of representatives who were not government members.

I think the Premier also suggested that all of the recommendations from the anti-poverty report, the No Place for Poverty report, needed to be accepted by the government and that’s not true. I think if the report is read carefully, there are a couple of priorities that the report specifies.

One of the things that I need to ask the Premier is: there is currently a proposal and I think it may have already been started, but there’s a plan to go out and to do more consultation, the community consultations. Those that will be consulted will be invited to consult, it won’t be an open invitation to anybody to come. I’d like to know from the Premier why this consultation is needed. The consultation was done last fall, and why do we have to go and consult with specific community people as opposed to anybody in the NWT? Thank you.

Thank you. The work that we need to do now from a Government of the Northwest Territories side is we’re involved heavily in the field of dealing with the poverty issue in the North with quite a number of departments: the Housing Corporation; Education Culture and Employment; Health and Social Services. We’ve got quite a number of others: ITI, Justice, in some form or another. So we need to look at our end of the work that’s being done and relate that to the work that’s been done by the NGOs as well. So the work they’ve done will help inform the work that we’re going to and are doing.

I think the important piece is we’ve got to do a measurement of what we’ve done in our day-to-day service as the Government of the Northwest Territories and see how we can bring those together.

Thanks to the Premier. I certainly don’t deny that the government is heavily involved in programs to try and attack poverty. What’s necessary is a cross-departmental coordination and cooperation among departments and the silos are still evident. I also don’t deny that the government needs to do the work and there needs to be an analysis of what we are doing.

My question to the Premier had to do with the consultation that is presumably about to happen

and I’d like to point out to the Premier that there were representatives of the government at that workshop, approximately 12 percent of the people in attendance. I’d like to know if the Premier, based on that information, will reconsider the consultation plan which is apparently ready to go and/or may already be gone. Take the advice of the Anti-Poverty Alliance and move forward from the report instead of doing work already done.

The work that was done by the anti-poverty group had a preliminary focus. Yes, the government was involved in the workshop at our request, but, quite simply, the fact that as the GNWT a number of departments... And yes, the reason that we include Executive, Health and Social Services, Education, Culture and Employment, ITI and Justice as part of the review of this is to knock those silos down and we have to look at the way that we’ve delivered those programs and come back and correlate that with the work that was done by the NGOs and come out with recommendations that would fit at that point going forward. We’ve committed to working with the Standing Committee on Social Programs to provide those results as we do that work.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Final supplementary, Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thanks to the Premier again. I didn’t, unfortunately, hear an answer to my question. I do hope that the Premier will reconsider this proposed round of consultation and change it to be more meaningful.

I’d like to know from the Premier if this working group and advisory group and whoever else may be involved will be able to give us a definition of poverty prior to September 2011.

Well, first and foremost, let’s not discount our own staff within the Government of the Northwest Territories from having a good level of input and credibility when it comes to this kind of work. It’s a mix of all services, whether it’s NGOs, but let’s not discount the work of our own people that are in the trenches, as well, day to day. I think bringing those two together can help at the end of the day and our goal is to have the work done before the end of the life of this Assembly.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. The honourable Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Earlier today I spoke about evolution before devolution and I think that these two go hand in hand. It’s actually being forced by the signing of the agreement-in-principle as we move forward.

I have questions for the Premier. As we move along with the talks towards the devolution final agreement and there’s resistant Aboriginal groups out there only because there’s lots of information and there’s lots of uncertainty and fear about what it really means to sign on to the AIP, are there other solutions out there that can still involve the Aboriginal governments working with the GNWT as we work towards devolution?

Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. The honourable Premier, Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The agreement-in-principle allows for groups to sign on at any time during the process, once they feel comfortable and they feel that they understand it more, if that’s a concern they have. In some cases, some groups may choose not to be there. It is a choice that they will need to make.

We will, as the agreement-in-principle states, allowed for every opportunity right through up until the final negotiations have been reached in the sense of initialling a final agreement for decision. The groups that would be a part of that can influence it.

That’s why I say come back to the table early. I say come back, because even the groups that said they were observers influenced the agreement-in-principle as it’s been designed. At the same time, to access the funding that’s there to help and the work that they need to do, by signing the agreement the same as we have done allows us to tap into some additional resources to help us in the preparation of that work.

I think that the future development of the Northwest Territories does include having the GNWT and Aboriginal governments having a dialogue. Once again, is there a solution or another alternative that we can involve Aboriginal groups in discussion as we work towards a final devolution agreement without them actually signing on? Can they be observers, like the Premier said, or is there another mechanism to allow full involvement? I really believe that as we work towards devolution, we’re also talking about evolution of our political development of the Northwest Territories. All must be involved.

The process we’ve engaged in has been inclusive and open to quite a number of avenues in the work and up into the agreement-in-principle that was signed. That included groups that would officially call themselves observers but had representatives that influenced some of the discussion and the way the language was written.

As we go forward, though, towards a final set of negotiations, as there will need to be bilateral discussions, so formal discussions on, for example, the jurisdiction sharing about how we share our

arrangements, how co-management bodies can work together, for example, or the resource revenue sharing section, they’ll need to sign up to this to be able to move forward on this because that will require bilateral discussions, Aboriginal governments to the GNWT, in some of the specific areas.

So I would say that we’ve been very flexible to this point, and as we go forward the groups need to look at what it is that we’re asking them to do and look at the language that’s been in place with the advice of many of the regions, observers as well as official groups at the table, that speak directly to the participation and safeties built into this document when it comes to protecting Aboriginal rights established as well as interim measures on the negotiations that are ongoing.

Some of the alternate solutions, of course, without Aboriginal groups actually signing on, is some of the funding that’s available to hold in trust their portion thereof of whatever percentage of their group. Is that something the Premier can look at?