Mr. Chair, I wanted to say that the fleet that we own, the CL-215s, were, I’d say, a gift from the federal government when we purchased them. They certainly have done their work fighting fires in the Northwest Territories. Certainly, we could continue to use them. We’ve seen a number of dollars that were spent on this past summer’s fire season and I think that there’s still some useful time left in the life of these CL-215s. I’m hoping that the government would continue to look for ways that we can retain them and continue to operate them in the North.

There has to be a lot of pros on the CL-215s. That’s why it makes good sense for us to keep these fleets within the control of the GNWT.

The second paragraph of this motion speaks to the community members who want to help their community by fighting fires, if they’re properly trained. We made a conscious decision to cut crews in some of the smaller communities to save money, and I know that didn’t make sense to some of the communities that no longer have suppression crews in their communities while there were fires

around the communities and the water bombers came in to fight the fires. There has to be a balance.

Community fire suppression crews do a lot for the communities and sometimes other resources are not available right away, and sometimes these fires are being monitored far from the community. They get bigger and bigger and pretty soon everybody is screaming and yelling for water bombers, it’s smoky and all that stuff. My friend next to me, fortunately they had cell phone service and made a phone call, and he said 20 minutes later two water bombers were coming in. They dropped six loads. I sure wish I had that in the Sahtu, you know. So we’ll be fighting every fire down here in the south and here. Last year it wasn’t like that in the Sahtu, and it was pretty smoky up there.

So this is where we see the second phase of the motion, to bring and train and start deploying the firefighters in the communities and the regions. You have to have fire suppression crews. You have to bring a balance to the technology and just good old plain manpower and look at some of the areas and how we’re fighting fires in the different regions. That’s why I said yesterday in Committee of the Whole, there seems to be some kind of a two-tier standard for fighting fire in the Northwest Territories. The department officials could tell me otherwise, but I’ve seen it in the Sahtu. I know there are some people in the communities who have fought fires for a long time. Sometimes they don’t meet the up-to-date standards of being a firefighter. It’s changed over time.

I fought fire when I was a young man – I’m still a young man – in the good old days of fighting fire. Today, I understand, they’ve got showers now. You never heard about that in ’79. They had showers in camps and you’re moving out there in the hot fires with backpacks and we gave ‘er until the fire was out. We were happy when the water bombers came because then we got a five-minute rest. Then we worked again. I think some of the old way of doing business is still valid today. I think that we’ve got to believe in our people, and this motion’s second paragraph is talking about the people don’t have that dependence so much on new aircraft coming in.

We’ve got to believe in our people and say that it makes sense to have a fire crew in the regions or in the communities that the crews were cut from, not having a suppression crew there. It’s an evolution process in developing our people in our smaller communities. And there are challenges. Nothing is going to be easy. I think that this motion is talking about that, bringing back the basics. This technology out there, the 802s, I think that they’re pretty good, from what I’m hearing. They can do some good work there. I think we need to balance it with some pretty good crews. You could call them

the 802 crews in the communities, a new breed of firefighters. Like I said, I never thought I’d see showers in the fire camps, but they are there. I remember how people felt when they were working on the fires and helping their community.

So I’m going to support this motion on that principle, and I think that there are some… Surely there must be some good points in the CL-215s and we can use them. I think there’s a need for it. All I’ve been hearing is the reasons why we need to let them go. I guess maybe for some of us it’s hard to let some things go. It may be true, I’m not doubting the information, but I think there’s a way that we could certainly keep them and see where they can be most beneficial to us. Those are my comments, Mr. Chair.