Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank my colleague Ms. Bisaro for bringing this motion to the committee level and receiving support to it today where we had a theme on anti-poverty and I was very happy to offer my support to second her motion.
This is a very important piece of work that is not yet completed by some very dedicated people in the Northwest Territories that see that this is a doable thing within the life of this government or within the Northwest Territories and more so raise the issue of the poverty situation in our communities in the Northwest Territories.
Ms. Bisaro touched on some of the factors that could be causing this issue to take forefront and what things we need to do to resolve them. Ms. Bisaro also talked about the dependency, how we now tend to lean on governments for everything. That has caused poor people. It costs people to stay poor because of the policies that are not quite fitting the needs of the people. I know for sure that people want to make a contribution to their community, to their family and to the Northwest Territories. They want to do things that would be appreciated by the community. Sometimes it’s very difficult to help when there are roadblocks and barriers and red tape from allowing them to do it. It stifles their spirit and creativity, their spontaneity, and they just say, oh well, just like nobody is listening.
I raise this point because, like I said in my Member’s statement, growing up in Tulita we did not have a definition, we did not know what poor was. The only way we found out if we were poor is that when you looked at the outsiders coming in to teach us, to police us, to look after our health, that these people had running water and flush toilets and electricity in their house, while we had gas lamps and slop pails or honey buckets and we hauled our own water and we made our own fire. We didn’t have a furnace. So we were trying to figure out, well what’s going on here. We didn’t know any better, but on those types of standards when you talk to the older people like my grandmother and Chief Albert Wright who signed the treaty in 1921, we were considered pretty well off living in a house, having gas lamps, having woodstoves compared to how they lived in the bush. We would look up and say, oh, you guys were poor, you had some hard times and the way you travelled.
So through the period of different changes in the lifestyles, now we’re the generation where a lot of our young people in Tulita know they want to do
well. I spoke with them through the election; I spoke to them after the election; and I know they want to make a contribution. They did not get up one day at 15 or 16 years old and say, well, I’m going to be a burden on government the rest of my life. These children, like Colville Lake students, Tulita students, when we went to visit in schools, want to become doctors, engineers, Ministers, MLAs, chiefs. They want to aspire to something that will be beneficial not only to them but to their community.
Somehow we have created this dependency as much as we’re depending on the federal government for our funding. We’re beggars to the federal government and this land is so rich.
When I look back now at my grandmother, they were rich in their culture, in their spirituality and their belief and they held a family close together. They were rich as a family. They weren’t poor, but if we look at them from an economic, materialistic way, we say, yes, they were poor. They were poor because they lived on the land. They made brush from the trees for their floor. They hunted and they trapped.
Today my elders say we are poor. We have houses. I can pick up the phone and the government’s going to deliver water for me. I don’t even have to walk down anymore to get water. If I can pick up the phone, the government isn’t going to let me starve. You’re going to feed me, but you’re only going to give me this much.
Our prices in Tulita are almost double what the prices in Yellowknife are. In Deline it’s $50 for a can of powdered milk for the babies. Our currency in the Sahtu is lower than Yellowknife. Like I said before, you put $50 on the table, you go to OK Economy, you know what kind of groceries you can get. You know what kind of change. If you do that in Tulita you know darn well you’ll only get a few cents left in your pocket. The value of our currency has depreciated as you go further north.
Mr. Premier also made reference to what it could cost to live in Sachs Harbour: $93,000 just to get by. That’s crazy. We do not have to continue this way of thinking that we’re poor. We’re very rich. Just as Ottawa sees us as the poor territory, we’re dependent on them. We beg them for money, to lend us a little more so that we can do some projects. Increase our borrowing. Give us more money. Give us more responsibility with money so we can do devolution programs. We’re beggars in our own land. Our people are beggars in their own community amongst their own people.
This Anti-Poverty Strategy is something that we should be looking at and we should support the people. I know a lot of people in Deline support that. They do not want to be beggars because kids follow the role models. If the parents are that way, make sure the prediction is that the kids will do the same thing. They’re going to ask for the same
thing. I want to say that, because when I look at the stats of the profile of the Sahtu, the anti-poverty and the way we look at poverty is based on the economic measurements.
To correlate, the percentage of employment is 44 percent. Norman Wells is 80 percent. Look at the communities that are the most busy with economic activities, the highest employment rate. The communities with no employment, like Deline at 42 percent. The housing problems in Colville Lake, percentage – this is on percentage – the problems of housing in Colville Lake is 97 percent.
I met a young mother, two children, two jobs, living in a log house with holes between the logs, no running water, no bath or shower, no indoor flush toilets. She’s trying hard. I encouraged her, and I support her, and she’s trying hard to make ends meet. I understand that is poor. That’s unacceptable. It’s so cold in there when I went there that there’s frost under her kitchen table. You know what? I admire that young lady because she reminds me of my mother when my mother was bringing us up. Those things that we’re measuring in poverty, she’s in poverty right now. Same with the lady in Deline who is living in a shack.
Housing problems in Norman Wells are only 25 percent. Tulita 49 percent.
The income in the Sahtu for 2006 was $46,000, but the smaller communities are much lower. In Fort Good Hope the income was $29,000; Deline, $31,000; Tulita, $33,000; and Norman Wells, $67,000. This shows that the average person in smaller communities is living in poverty. In the Sahtu 19.7 percent of people had total incomes of less than $10,000 a year. In the Sahtu 56.6 percent of the people had total incomes of less than $35,000 a year. It’s also that the majority of people are living in poverty. That’s the conclusion.
Poverty is also related to education. Like I said, in the olden days we were very well educated on the land. It will be unbelievable today if you take any one of us who wasn’t raised or living on the land and to go out and expect you to live on the land. You would be poor. You would starve to death. You would ask for Dene social income assistance to help you live off the land. We would never, ever accept or allow anybody to live on the land without knowing anything. So our education system was rich and wealthy, because it made us independent.
Somehow, like Ms. Bisaro said, we’ve become dependent. People feed us and educate us and we move into the economic lifestyle of the world.
The education in Colville Lake, the high school graduation rate is 28 percent. The Northwest Territories average is 70 percent. In Deline the average is 46 percent. Fort Good Hope is 40 percent. Norman Wells, again, is 82 percent. You see how the economic activity flows around where
there’s lots of business and how the poverty is decreased while the other communities don’t have much activity and the poverty is more of an issue there. Tulita has 48 percent. It’s well known that low education levels are linked to unemployment and poverty.
We ask, through this motion, that some serious consideration be put to how we change people’s thinking that they’re not poor, that they’re rich, and the government needs to look at how we create that interdependency and no longer be dependent on government.
People can and will make it. There’s more than enough in this world to share. Just as you go onto the land, there’s lots and lots of food to eat there. The young people today in Tulita are so used to the government’s dependency that it’s a shame we have come that far from once being a proud and strong people. Hopefully with the group of this hardworking people we can help us all to learn how to live independently and be wealthy. This issue for sure one day can be eradicated in the Northwest Territories.
I thank Ms. Bisaro for bringing this motion up and having us debate on it.