Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This motion is restating what the Minister talked about
earlier in the House, to support and give the nudge to the government that this is a priority. People in the communities would really appreciate this, because this would give justice to our people when we have Ministers, bureaucrats or any other government agencies that come into our communities. They know they will get the proper information, the terminology will be right and these translators would do great justice to the Aboriginal language services, to the Aboriginal Languages Act.
Right now it will give more weight and this government will not only pay lip service, but when we have official meetings of this government for the people, that the people can feel comfortable enough to say we want to say it in our own language and we don’t need to have a hit and miss on the interpretation. It’s being properly translated the way we want to do it.
So this motion here speaks to having a secretariat developed, again establishing the Government of the Northwest Territories, and to know that if they say language is important to the people of the Northwest Territories, this motion is putting the money into the mouth of the government, so important that we’re going to establish a secretariat for the Government of the Northwest Territories to recognize all the different Aboriginal languages and give respect and dignity to those languages. Then when we go back into the communities, the older people, the elders, people who want to hang on to their languages will know that this government really is working towards providing this service, other than just having English spoken in our communities. They can feel comfortable enough to go to the hospitals or the health centres and know that proper terminology will be used, or they can go to the legal system, a special facility or courts, whatever programs Justice has, even the RCMP, and know that these services are going to be provided.
So this is giving a nudge to the government and we’ll see how this motion plays out in the next four years. We’ll see if we continue to get lip service or if there is actually going to be some work done on this. Let’s see how strong this motion is with this Cabinet. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.