Thank you, Mr. Chair. This budget, when you gotta go, you gotta go.
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It is the learning process of doing this budget here over the last nine years. The Minister has been quite steady and has been quite consistent with the message from government. I do want to, on a serious note, offer my condolences to him and his family. That is part of business in the government and continuing on doing what we have to do.
The process that we have entered into is doing our committee work, doing our consultation with the Minister, but the Minister also… I want to hear more about the Minister’s public consultation on the communities with the demonstration of the legal blocks, and the efficiency and effectiveness and if we in our constituency… This is a good measurement if we’re doing our work right, by having the Minister do a public consultation on how the money could be spent, and what we’ve been telling them over there, that we’ve been meeting with the Minister in committee meetings to look at some of the wish lists of our ridings here. I want to see if we’ve got value for our dollar through that consultation process.
Mr. Chair, the wish list comes up every year, and we go through an exercise called the business planning session. I do want to give my thanks to the
Minister and to the Cabinet Ministers for responding to some of the needs in the Sahtu in regard to the proving up of resources that are happening right now in the Sahtu with regard to the oil and gas exploration, the record 11 parcels that have been taken up by the five major oil companies to expend over $630 million for five years, with an extension of their licences to be renewed for another three or four more years.
The people in the Sahtu could see that we’re going to need the help of the government to deal with the increased activity in all sectors and all fronts of the territorial government. Even with the RCMP in Tulita, we thank you. I’ve been getting calls from Tulita saying that the increase of activity, because of alcohol and other issues that deal with the laws, there’s a high number of criminal activity happening in all the Sahtu communities. So we have some support there, also with ENR and ITI and Education. We want to thank the government for responding to the needs.
There’s probably going to be another request as the activities continue, once the oil companies look at the area they’re working on, and more looking needs to be done in that area to have a business case go forward to look at a different type of development in that area. So I do want to say thank you to the government for responding in this area for us.
The process that we go through is very tedious. It’s long. We have many meetings. We look at the other big projects that are going on with regard to devolution, decentralization, governments, infrastructure, programs and services, and we try our best to respond to some of these needs in our communities.
We also have to deal with the fiscal realities, as the Minister states, of what’s on the table right now. That’s what we have to deal with. Some of them seem more beneficial to the whole of the North, and some of the communities that I serve continue to push for basic essential services for the well-being of the people, such as the communities without RCMP stations or health nurse stations in our communities. There are communities today that are not served by those basic essential services. We need to look at some of those and start adjusting our priorities to say that, in this government, we’re going to make sure that we start filling those communities with RCMP officers or nurses or the quality of our educational schools or the so-called schools. It’s a very tough juggling priority we look at, but that’s what we are here for. We’re here for those things. There are many issues that I see in the budget that we can work on.
My colleague talked about the cost of living. It’s something this government can work with us, with Nutritious North Canada and look at the entry points of Nutritious North programs coming to the
North. It might be cheaper for them to have an entry point in Norman Wells, Inuvik, Simpson, Hay River, so that we could take advantage of, once they are in Norman Wells, we could fly them to the Sahtu communities which would reduce the cost of food in our communities.
I talked to Minister Ramsay in our exchange the other day about providing some flexible, strong opportunities to have northern fish, bottled water, those types of things come into our community. I’m looking forward to some flexibility with this budget. I look at some of the things that we could embark on, such as the Voisey’s Bay model that Mr. Menicoche talked about, and see if that would fit the scenario with the Sahtu.
Some of our communities continue to suffer high employment, into the 42 percent, and somehow small employment opportunities, a program that was fought for and approved through this government, is a question that we need to think about. Some regions have and some regions have not. I want to look at the employment of our small communities and look at the small employment opportunities program that we had going.
I also want to look at decentralization through the percentage of positions in our region that are hired by the GNWT in the North Slave, South Slave, Tlicho, Sahtu, Beaufort-Delta. I want to see how we can get those numbers that Mr. Bouchard talked about, so that we can start preparing our regions for these decentralization positions, because what is there now for us to go on? Where are these positions coming? Which region is going to benefit in the millions once these positions are signed over to the GNWT? Where are they going to go? We have to have a hard look at these numbers, a sobering look and say, the matter of the fact, Jack, $20 million is going to come to Yellowknife and $100,000 or $2 million is going to come to the Sahtu or the Delta regions. We have to have that discussion. That’s why we’re here. Those kinds of things I want to look at.
The last thing I want to say is, we have to look at empowering our people. They have the answers. The Minister and the Cabinet, I want to thank you for the budget. It is a good budget, but we still have a lot of work to do. Let’s not sleep now. We have a couple of more years to work before we go back out and ask for our jobs again. Thank you.