Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a couple of comments here. I understand that this money is for, I believe there’s office space that has been secured, but it’s for developing the office space. But this is for moving, transferring the Business Incentive Policy monitoring office from Yellowknife to Hay River and the motivation, according to our information, is a decentralization effort. But I’d just like to point out some of the fallacies here of the plan that this government is pursuing right now.
If you look at, in fact, the number of jobs per capita, Hay River, or the South Slave, has the highest proportion of government jobs per capita. I’m all for decentralization, but I believe it needs to be done in a smart and aware way within the context of what people are facing in communities. By contrast, I think it has something like 13 percent of government jobs, Yellowknife about 12 percent, and then we have regions like the Tlicho, which is down about 7 percent. Relative to their population, they are very low.
I think we need to be a lot smarter about how we do these things so that we achieve the things that we claim to be wanting here with this.
The other aspect to consider is, my understanding is that none of the staff are transferring. I stand to be corrected there, but I note in our briefing that we’re looking for staff here. Maybe I’ll just ask, is that the case and when are we expecting to fill these positions? I’m not sure this falls exactly under this infrastructure, Mr. Chair. I’ll let you or the Minister decide, but I think when we make these sorts of decisions and have these infrastructure costs associated with them, we need to put it all within the context of the big picture. I’ll throw that out there and see what people want to do in terms of response as we discuss this particular item.