Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Economic Opportunities Strategy and the Mineral Development Strategy are documents that this committee had time for at least playing a hand in forming the documents. As my colleague Mr. Bouchard had indicated, he feels good about it and my sense is that I am fairly confident this is a go-forward document and I’m looking forward to the rollout ensuring communities and regions and
territories and the whole NWT as a landscape. We become involved with this whole document.
What I do want to highlight is that there needs to be at least a clear reporting mechanism. The Minister has indicated there could be possible periodic reviews of the timeline of the strategies, both the Economic Opportunities Strategy and the Mineral Development Strategy. I think it’s essential that we have, at least in the mid-term, some status reports in terms of the major sectors that have been highlighted or at least been part of the strategy. At the same time, there needs to be a final analysis of how the strategies work.
The strategy, essentially, is not identifying the goals and how we are going to employ economic initiatives across the NWT. For the most part, I feel that this is a good constructive document. At the same time, we need to remind ourselves that some communities are have-not communities. It’s just the way that geographically where we’re located, some of the smaller communities, and we need to ensure that we don’t forget about the traditional local economies and that’s the hunting, fishing and trapping. Arising out of that, if we could maybe develop opportunities.
The whole area of tourism, we have to remind ourselves, too, that there are some local initiatives that are happening. Like in my riding, we have Dene Fur Clouds and we have the service sectors that operate at least a service for the travelling public, and we need to remind ourselves of those important mechanisms and pillars need to remain so that we have a vibrant economy in all of our ridings. At the same time, we have to look into the future in terms of being optimistic. I’m very hopeful that at some point we’ll realize our wood pellet initiative in the riding that I represent, that all communities will be able to be involved and benefit from the project.
Last, but not least, because in the North where we’re at there’s a strong propensity for natural resource development. It’s a matter of fact that we need development to happen so that we can invigorate the economy, create businesses and jobs. At the same time, we need to be reminded that it has to be done in a balanced way. Recently this government came up with the Land Use Framework in terms of how it is that we’re going to engage the land and water of the NWT. So we play it fairly safe and, at the same time, we have a balanced perspective. The big thing in that too, and one of my colleagues raised it, is there has to be proper engagement with the Aboriginal governments. We can’t roll out these initiatives in a silo. There has to be multiple partners ensuring that we have maximum involvement for maximum success. Mahsi.