Thank you, Madam Chair. I wanted to say to the Minister comments to his staff and his department. I really wanted to express my appreciation for the Minister and staff coming to the Sahtu and visiting us in the Sahtu and coming to all of the communities. I know you split your tour with the Minister of Health and Social Services portions, but I appreciate the two Ministers making it into the Sahtu region and listening to the people and seeing things first-hand as to how we operate and how we deal with things and what some of the challenges are that we have in our smaller communities with the Government of the Northwest Territories.
One thing I would like to say to the Minister is that I appreciated your consistent message of the government’s Secondment Program policy, and
some of the leaders were hearing for the first time how we could get involved with the secondment of GNWT employees or we lend you our employees for training because of funding. It is very challenging in terms of can we pay them enough. So that was good for me to talk to the chiefs after and say, well, you didn’t really quite understand it or maybe because they were so busy they didn’t really get to know it. It is something that you consistently said to the people in the Sahtu communities about this program. I think once you say it enough and keep saying it, that it is starting to stick. I do want to say that to the Minister. I appreciate him coming to the Sahtu.
I do want to say that with the Human Resources, the Minister is embarking on a new trail on how do we put together a plan that respects the different diverse cultures in the Northwest Territories, that the government senior bureaucracy, deputy ministers, associated assistant deputy ministers, directors have the opportunity to understand and to learn about the people that they are serving. In Tlicho, in the valley, Sahtu, Gwich’in, that they get to understand the culture and understand their way of life and that we have that exchange. I look at that partly as a learning mission and also a reconciliation of bosses, if you call it that. However, the government is on the right track. We are doing this. I appreciate your struggles and moving this policy forward.
Sometimes we don’t always have willing partners and sometimes it is a challenge, so I admire your strength and your commitment to keep this vision. Really you are serving the people in the community and in fact paying our bills, because we are here to represent them. With that, I wanted to say to the Minister.
I am also looking forward to where the government will now start moving some of these positions in the earlier orders of the day that we talked about decentralization of Human Resources, and one of the biggest ones is the post-devolution negotiations to a final agreement. How do we move some of those much needed positions into our regions and our smaller communities? If we did a cost-analysis of those, the smaller communities and regions sometimes will not always win. In a similar type of analogy, if we did a cost analysis of all the schools and arenas we put in our communities, you will see if that makes sense, but we do it anyhow. Hopefully you take that type of view and position when we look at positions in the small communities if you’re looking at a cost analysis. Because if you do that, Yellowknife will always… Our larger centres always win. It’s cheaper, it costs more and we can stretch our dollar more. But if we start moving the positions into our communities in such a way where we start building arenas and schools, then we will be okay. If we can strengthen the communities and regions, we will also strengthen Yellowknife and Yellowknife
will strengthen us. You will see it when you start seeing our people not coming to larger centres. Right now they’re coming to Yellowknife or Hay River or Inuvik. They’re coming here. What do we have to offer these 20 graduates we have one year, or 10 grads?
There’s only so much that can be offered in our community or in the region. There are many factors and we need to support each other, especially when we have the devolution on file and there are discussions on the post-management of devolution. There are discussion papers out there. They are talking about it. They are talking about how we’re going to move these positions from Ottawa. It’s not a secret to us. They are talking about it in ENR, in Human Resources, it’s happening right now as we’re sitting here. I don’t know what you have planned right now for the Sahtu. No one is telling me anything. All I know is that after I looked at the whole budget book, the main estimates, that Yellowknife is getting a lot of added positions in the various departments. You times that by X amount of thousands of dollars, they’re getting a boost in the economy. Let’s not kid ourselves. I mean, it’s all about economics sometimes and these positions are added here and added there and so forth. You’re going to get extra hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hence you guys need a new school in Yellowknife; you need more houses in Yellowknife. Why don’t we have that in our regions, in our communities?
That’s why I ask the government to look not only at the economic feasibility analysis of these positions, look at what it means for us in our regions. So I’ve come to the conclusion, Mr. Minister, that you have a task ahead of you, and I believe you’re up to it and I believe your staff are up to it, to look at the financial fiscal restraints of our government. It does make all logical sense to have these positions come to Yellowknife if we want to pay for an ITI program or Aboriginal field program or a treatment program who have those reasons why.
So I’m hoping that the government will increase its Aboriginal hire in senior management, that there will be some strong candidates for leadership programs. I’ve seen the summer student list and we’re not doing too badly in that. I really appreciate this government’s stance on getting our people to work. I’ve, again, asked the Minister that when you look at the overall budget in here, you look at the positions, you see too many of the positions going into Yellowknife. If you add them up in the departments, there’s not too much going into the regions.
I guess I’ll have to continue my messaging through the departments of what I saw. I know the Ministers give justifiable answers to my questions and I question the post-devolution position. We need to help each other out here, otherwise it’s going to be
us against… I really don’t want that. That’s how it’s rolling out in the paper, and other kind of ways, but that’s what is laying down in front of us. Too much is going to Yellowknife. Thank you.