Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to talk a little bit today about the concentration of specialized services in Yellowknife, when there are other communities outside of Yellowknife which are large enough and have great enough need to have some capital infrastructure to address some of these things.
In Yellowknife we have Betty House, Bailey House, the new dementia facility, a complex that completely accommodates people who require barrier-free access; a whole complex downtown Yellowknife for people who have physical disabilities who require barrier-free access. We have women’s shelters, we have all kinds of services here. These services and this infrastructure obviously came about as a result of a very organized and concerted effort on the part of organizations, NGOs, volunteers, fundraisers, which you have a lot to draw on here in Yellowknife. There are a lot of very community-minded people in Yellowknife and I believe that these facilities have come on stream as a result of those efforts.
But we have communities outside of Yellowknife. We don’t want to have to tell our people that if they want these services, move to Yellowknife. We have homelessness in Hay River as well.
I’d like to ask the Premier how we get our proposals for infrastructure on the table. Do we need to form community groups to put together proposals to appeal to the government for the millions of dollars that they get here in Yellowknife? What is our access? What is our avenue to this kind of support? We do need these and we can sustain these facilities outside of the capital.