Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Indeed, it is good to be back in this House and we have a good long stretch ahead of us here where we will get a chance to air all of our concerns and all of our issues. We have been away for a while, so I have a few of them that have built up, I guess, over the time that we have been away and I have a lot of things that I want to talk about in the next six weeks.
The Premier has delivered his address today for the opening of session, and it paints a very promising picture of our future here in the North, and I want to be the first one to applaud the efforts of this government on all that they have accomplished and where we are.
But it’s our job here in this House, and as Members too, to sometimes report not just the good news but some of the concerns. One concern I have, very seriously, is that no matter how bright our future is, we have to address the issue of our declining population.
If we do all of these wonderful things that we are talking about doing, who’s benefit are we doing them for if not for our own people who have built the North, who reside in the North? The fact is that the population of the Northwest Territories is declining. This affects us in many ways. It affects our capacity. It affects our transfer payment from the federal government. I think it’s up to now about $25,000 per person. So, over the next several days – I can’t squeeze it into two and a half minutes – I want to talk about some ideas I have for how we can stop the hole in the bucket, so to speak, of the loss of people, of resources, of capacity, of talent that seems to be going southward, which is not very good.
Just to touch on a few things that may be affecting people’s desire to stay in the North, I’m just going to list off a few of them: the cost of living, how we treat our seniors and keep them here in the Northwest Territories when they retire, the employment of our own people. We try and we have lots of policies, but there are lots of gaps, and I could tell many stories of how we have failed to employ our own people. We also do need to reach out to newcomers, and I know the government has had job fairs and Make Your Mark and so on.
We do have to knock on the doors of people we don’t know, but we need to pay attention to those who could be working in this territory at this time. Maybe we need to get creative, like we expect our diamond mines and large industry to offer inducements, incentives to bring people to live in the North. We need to bring a lot of people home. We’ve had people born, raised, educated – we’ve even contributed to their education – and they are
currently not here because there have been gaps in the system. Thank you.