Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I’d like to thank the Minister for his opening comments today. I’m just going to go through and highlight just a couple of areas of interest to me.
One of the first areas I’d like to highlight is the investment of $150,000 into an economic development officer in the community of Ulukhaktok. I think this is a great step. I attended, in November, a meeting to work on a framework for the Anti-Poverty Strategy and in my opinion for any Anti-Poverty Strategy to be effective, Industry and Tourism and Investment and business need to be there. They need to be a partner. The reason I think that is because without economic development we can do all the social programs we want, but there won’t be any progress, there won’t be anything for these people to do. I think putting something, like, an EDO in a community like Ulukhaktok is going to solve the problem. I think having that person there who can work with local people to identify local opportunities that they can create their own businesses is brilliant and I know we don’t have one in every community and some communities might be too small to warrant them now, but over time it would be great to see more economic development officers in the communities working with the people on any opportunity that exists to bring money into a community and put money into pockets rather than just continuing to circulate the dollars that are there. I think an EDO in Ulukhaktok is a good step.
Also, you talked about increased money for SEED. I think that’s great. Once again, it would be great to see some of that money getting into the communities and more small business occurring in the communities. The more people we employ in the communities, the less we’ll be spending on social programs. So I’m happy to see that, but I’d
like to see some additional focus on getting some of that stuff into the communities.
I’m very, very pleased to see additional money, more money going into things like arts and crafts. Now, I do have a question and you can answer it when you’re doing your summation, when you say arts and crafts I do want to know what you mean by art because art is very broad. Does that mean print or painting, or does it include things like performance art and stuff like that? There are many opportunities under that word “art” and under what is art for business opportunities and giving people meaningful employment even if they are running their own businesses.
I’m happy to see the $100,000 in support of the film industry. I know that I and my colleagues have been very vocal about the advantages that the film industry can bring to the Northwest Territories. I am going to be interested to see exactly what you’re spending that $100,000 on, whether it’s the study or whether we’re actually planning some implementation of some of the recommendations that we might see in May. I think it’s May when we’re going to see them. So that’s very good.
Different subject, and you didn’t really touch on this one, but this is something I and some of my colleagues attended a briefing a little while ago with NWT Tourism, the Minister himself and some representatives from the Hotel Association. My colleague Mr. Hawkins was talking about a hotel tax earlier today and I heard something slightly different when I was meeting with those people. I heard some representatives from the Hotel Association saying we would like legislation that would allow communities to choose to put in a hotel tax or not, and that those revenues, the 1 percent Mr. Hawkins was talking about, would then go back to the association to help them promote and support tourism in the Northwest Territories. I think that’s brilliant. I’m not sure that the GNWT should be putting a territory-wide tax, but I do support the idea of us putting in some legislation that would allow communities to choose to do that to support their hotel associations and I would like to see the Minister obviously champion in that to the Minister of Finance so that we can get that to happen. I think the legislation already exists in some jurisdictions. It should not be too hard for us to jump on that, get it to the Minister of Finance and implement it so those communities can make choices in the best interest of tourism in their communities and regions. So I’d really like to see the Minister making some progress in that area.
Very happy to see the investment in agriculture and fishing and community gardens, brilliant. Anything to help reduce the cost of living is a win-win. In October and previously I made statements and comments and I asked questions about red tape and I know my colleague Mr. Hawkins made some
statements about red tape earlier in this session. Recognizing that the GNWT is not the only person responsible for red tape -- even though in the report it sounds like everything is the Government of the Northwest Territories by CFIB -- red tape is in the City, red tape is in the GNWT, red tape is in the federal government. I’m going to be asking some questions when we get to that area about what kind of paper requirement, what kind of reporting requirement do we require through SEED and for the small local businesses have we ever really dug into our program to see how much red tape our programs are creating for these small businesses. Is it reasonable? Is it too much? Are we making sure that people understand what the forms are, why they have to fill these things out and if there’s duplication have we considered getting rid of it? So red tape is an issue and when we get to that section I will be talking to it.
There are a lot of things happening in the Northwest Territories, and with the signing of the AIP and devolution in our foreseeable future there’s going to be more opportunities. So I’m really happy to hear you talk about things like Avalon, Canadian Zinc Corporation, Prairie Creek, diamond mines. I think we need to keep moving on those areas, responsible development. We need to be proponents of responsible development. So I’m happy to see some of those things there that could bring fresh new dollars into the Northwest Territories. Like I’ve said before, the dollars coming in are important and we need to bring outside dollars in and we need to find ways to circulate it as much as we can. The big industries will bring in the dollars, but we need as much strong, sustainable small businesses to keep those dollars circulating as much as possible. So it’s good to see some of those big things coming and hopefully we’ll see some more as we take some additional responsibility for our Territory, keeping in mind that it must be environmentally and socially responsible.
I will have many questions during detail, but thank you for your remarks and I look forward to your general thoughts on some of the things I’ve said and things I’m sure my colleagues are going to say as well. Thank you so much.