Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Before I begin, I’d just like to welcome everybody back to the House. I hope everybody had a good summer. I can tell everyone is really eager to get right into the issues that affect the Northwest Territories here and our Northerners.

Earlier today we heard in our Premier’s sessional statement that we do have a very slow economic

growth, and now in order to be effective we need to acquire effective partnerships with everybody.

I think this is a great time for this government to embrace, focus and support other types of industry that we’ve ignored or haven’t given them the full support to really grow our economy in the Northwest Territories. One in particular is tourism.

In Inuvik alone this summer, being there most of the summer, I did see that we had a significant number of tourists coming up the Dempster Highway, and when I look at some of the statistics, it was about 300 more people than last year who travelled up the Dempster Highway to Inuvik. In fact, more people are going up the Dempster all the way up to Inuvik then they were stopping at some of the Yukon tourism facilities.

Inuvik does have something to offer, something to give, but I think it goes beyond that. What’s going on in Inuvik is we have a great stakeholders grou

p that’s

doing some really great work for the region, for the community, and they’re bringing in the numbers. They’re meeting on a regular basis and they’re helping our local businesses, our local tourist operators and some of our local community people getting jobs in the tourism industry. Some of the areas that they’re working on developing are things around developing of packages and experiences around cultural practices, looking at developing a heritage festival. Sales went up in carving and other artwork. As I said, locals are being employed in the service industry and more work is being done on things such as tourist training opportunities such as customer service, helping people pursue business licences that focus around tourism, and more importantly,

I think they’re trying to create something

that’s more sustainable not only during the summertime but all year round.

I will have questions later for the Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment on how we can help support our regional economic development community groups to increase our economic diversity throughout the Northwest Territories.