I want to make a few comments to this infrastructure here. I’m very happy to see that the Minister has seen some fortitude to put in some preliminary work with the Canol Heritage Trail. I know I would have liked to see more development; however, they are in a very complex process right now with the Canol Heritage Trail and the Doi T’oh Canyon Park and the Doi T’oh Territorial Park. They are working closely with the federal government; however, the government has agreed to look at how they continue working in the preliminary stages to begin developing the heritage trail that is in the books with the organizations in the Sahtu, namely the Norman Wells and Tulita land corporations and the communities of Norman Wells and Tulita, and that the work is going to start for the next couple of years.
I also see that we have one park in the Sahtu, McKinnon Territorial Park, with some infrastructure development happening there. I wanted to make note that when I was looking at the list of parks, that were going to receive some attention, that there was a lot of parks in the North that were going to see some development, and in the Sahtu we only see one, McKinnon Territorial Park. There is some work on the Canol, and again, for infrastructure purposes, I certainly support the areas where they are going to see some support such as a new shower facility or a kitchen shelter or a group camping area, or they are even able to get a septic tank at one of the parks and a new shower building. These are good things that we want, to support the tourists coming in and treat them like royalty, otherwise they will complain. But this is the Northwest Territories, so they need to expect some
of the wild, wild west wilderness for them to experience.
I was thinking maybe Industry, Tourism and Investment can put some real good facilities into our school in Colville Lake, if they are going to do this type of work here. Anyhow, that is just far-out thinking here.
I want to ask the Minister what strategies they have in place to work with the Sahtu communities to put maybe another park into our communities – they call them wayside parks – because right now you only have one. People in Fort Good Hope have asked me, even Tulita, how can we get this in the books to start putting some infrastructure parks in our community, get some infrastructure dollars. So I want to ask the Minister if he would be willing to instruct or have some discussions with his staff in Norman Wells, the regional office there to work with the community.
I know they have done some trail development on Bear Rock and some of those areas around the community, which is appreciated. We don’t have the infrastructure like our southern friends in the parks in the Northwest Territories, so that doesn’t really help us out much because there are no all-weather roads or the roads are not built yet to a standard where the southern tourists like to travel on. We certainly want to bring the tourists to the North, however, they only get to see a small percentage or portion of the North, and they are missing a huge amount of opportunity and piece of the North that maybe they should be seeing. So I want to ask the Minister if he would give some consideration with his officials, when they go back into planning, how they could start involving more opportunities such as parks in the Sahtu region. Those are my general comments for Industry, Tourism and Investment.
