Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. It’s a pleasure to second this motion by my honourable colleague from the Sahtu, Mr. Norman Yakeleya, only because when we talk about development in the Northwest Territories, I think initially we were talking about a Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, the huge development that we were going to have. The federal government was going to actually kick in a $500 million impact fund to help us address our issues, and this is like a new and emerging issue that often jurisdictions are faced with, especially ours. I know that we had very successful NWT Days in Ottawa and we were all there lobbying for our seven priorities that we had but, regretfully, we didn’t have the time to explain that the Sahtu shale play is having a big impact just with exploration alone, never mind development.
I spoke with the Minister of ITI about some of what Mr. Yakeleya was talking about, you know, let’s ask the federal government for an impact fund similar to the Voisey’s Bay model, but the Minister was saying, well, we’ve got to wait until the reserves are proven. My experience in talking with the industry, as well, is that it is pretty much proven, because they’re building a $50 million road to test some wells. To me that says they’re not going to invest that kind of money and infrastructure just to say it’s unproven.
So I like this motion only because it speaks to our government to say, look, start working with the federal government, we’ve got to get some impact funding and, most particularly, when it comes to my riding, we saw in January when the road was shut down going up north how much of an impact that had on the communities of Wrigley and Fort Simpson. It backed up all the way to Hay River as well. So it just showed me the impact of how huge that Sahtu shale play is, how much investment is going in there and how much industry is impacting our communities.
As well, the Minister of Transportation made a Minister’s statement on February 22nd and talked
about how CanNor is supportive of the Mackenzie Valley Highway and the development of it. I’d certainly like to see it proceed. Other regions have their projects. Tuktoyaktuk is developing their road, but there’s no reason why the road cannot be completed north of Wrigley concurrently, at the same time. I know that sometimes we’ve got to wait to release funding, but at the same time with some hard work and lobbying of the federal government to get investments from programs such as CanNor or others. Once we convince our federal counterparts that in order to really support industrial development of this nature, they will have to contribute a similar type of impact fund. I really urge that and that’s what this motion speaks to, as well
as many other areas that have to be addressed. We have to pay attention to this. We cannot let this development just run on its own. We have to be aware, we have to work with it, we have to work with our federal counterparts, and at the same time, we have to mitigate the impacts on our communities.
I’ve spoken many times about having nursing in Wrigley and it was almost imminent when we had the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline discussions because that $5 million impact fund spoke about developing the hospital in Fort Simpson and increasing nursing in Wrigley and developing our highway infrastructure north.
I think we still need that type of impact fund and I would urge our Cabinet to begin discussions with Ottawa. Once again, the Voisey’s Bay model comes up time and time again. That’s the type of thing that I support in this motion. I urge all my colleagues to support this motion and urge our Cabinet to begin working with our federal counterparts and to show them the impact this development is having in our North.