Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, I mean, we are at a crossroads where someone has to give a little bit to allow this process to work itself out. I think we can’t be focussing only on one area, realizing we could jeopardize not only the area of devolution for the Northwest Territories but the whole political development of the Northwest Territories. In the confines of improving our working relationship with the indigenous governments of the Northwest Territories. For me that is something we cannot jeopardize. There are threats of court actions and everything else. For me that is the last place you want a devolution agreement to end up before you even get to a table. There again it’s something that is real. The possibility is pretty good.
The other issue we have to realize is how do we continue to message this thing. I was listening to the radio the other day and I couldn’t sit there wondering about the message that you were trying to get out. The message is we gave the Aboriginal groups for devolution and they were involved. Well, everybody that knows and spent some time in this Legislature know that the majority of that $8 million was spent on something called an Aboriginal Summit, which was made up of consultants, legal beagles, which the Aboriginal leadership walked away from because they lost control of it. Ourselves as government, the majority of that $8 million was spent on the Aboriginal Summit. That was during that period of time that the Aboriginal groups reformatted themselves and decided to come back with a northern leaders’ concept where only northern leaders were able to partake in the process going forward because of that bad experience of how that took on a life of its own and spent a ton of money on consultants and lawyers and everything else and not really meeting the priorities of the Aboriginal leadership.
We just had a debate here a couple pages ago about NGO funding. We’re spending millions of dollars on NGO funding every year and I don’t see the Government of the Northwest Territories posting that on the website and putting out a thing that we spend $2 million here on NGO funding and who’s getting what. For me, I don’t think that messaging is fair and it’s not clear and if you’re going to put that type of message on, you should clearly identify how that $8 million was spent and
what type of groups it was spent on. There were Aboriginal groups that didn’t take any of that money because they didn’t want to be seen as taking money from the government to partake in a process they didn’t believe in.
I think it’s how we develop that message and getting that information out. I’d like to ask the Premier if there is a possibility that you can publicly categorize the dollars that have been spent on devolution and NGO funding so that we can release it to the public and show them who exactly those dollars were spent by and what they were spent on.