Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to comment on some of the general comments that have been made. MLA Krutko, a lot of the comments that he made are exactly what we’re trying to do as a department and as a government to promote small business, develop local economies, promote tourism at the local level, and the tools that we have we’re working very hard to do that with. As a department our main goal when we started the 16
th
Assembly was that we
want to have development in every community, every one of our 33 communities in the Northwest Territories and I think we’re well on our way to getting there.
Big game hunting, I know there’s big game hunting in the Mackenzie Mountains all the way. I’d be prepared to look at that to see what the communities want to do and I’d have to see what would be involved in them getting involved. I think there are licences already and so on.
On the Dempster Highway, the constant challenge that we have, we have a tourism centre in Dawson to divert people to go up to the Dempster and I think we need to develop more tourism products so
that when they do go up there they spend a lot more time in the communities.
The canvas shop, we have a new board of directors for the canvas shop and we’re trying to get that back on track.
On the mandates, well, the last Legislative Assembly decided to split up RWED and make two departments and those are the mandates that were given to us.
On the Mackenzie Pipeline, I agree. There’s been a lot of work going on. The Aboriginal Oil and Gas Skills Training Fund of $9 million, that’s going to run out fairly soon. It’s probably going to go the same way as the Mining Skills Program. So I think we need to put pressure on the federal government to keep that going and we need to make sure that we’re ready.
The energy initiatives, I know that when we went to some of the smaller communities that have been affected, everybody is very pleased and we have to make sure that those reductions are passed on. We are engaged with our Statistics Bureau to monitor all of the retailers that we met with before we reduced the rates, before we introduce commercial rates. They all said their preference was to have lower rates that would be transparent and that they were going to make sure that those lower rates were passed on resulting in lower costs. We’re going to be following up also with the larger retailers that we had met with before these were passed on.
On support for trappers, I agree that it’s been a long time since we increased it. The fur prices are increasing. I think the projection for this year is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20 percent. We agree we have the best fur in the world and that’s why we’ve developed the Genuine Mackenzie Valley Fur brand and everybody recognizes, it’s world-renowned and that’s added value to our product.
Socio-economic agreements, we think it’s important to make sure we maximize the benefits.
On the parks, Nechalacho is going to be one of the biggest parks in the Sahtu and that’s pretty close.
On the use of ATVs, this is still an issue. We’ll have to continue to work together.
I can vouch that when the federal Environment Minister was here we did put forward the issues and concerns about water quality, quantity. We also talked about parks. We support parks but we also have some issues with parks boundaries and how you deal with areas of high mineral potential.
On promoting arts and crafts and Northern House, we’re finding that there’s an expectation of what next. A lot of the performing artists, visual artists, feel that we have to build on the momentum, so we’re getting a lot of suggestions such as maybe
we should have a mobile exhibition or so on, but that’s something that we will be looking at.
That’s all the comments I had, Mr. Chair. Thank you.