Well, first of all, Mr. Speaker, I thank those who have spoken in favour of the motion, and those who spoke against the motion, I probably won’t thank you at this time. But in the spirit of consensus government, I do recognize and appreciate and respect your perspectives.
I did hear a few things and they did cause me great concern. Mr. Speaker, this is a very important question, the plebiscite question on hydraulic fracturing. The reality here before us, though, is if we can’t use the Plebiscite Act for stuff this important, why bother having it?
I heard the cries of people suggesting things, and I was actually quite upset when I heard colleagues suggest this is about region against region. To be honest, that actually bothered me quite a bit. Yellowknife is not against any region. More particularly, if I may say, Yellowknife, in my opinion, certainly everyone I know isn’t against the Sahtu in any way. If anything, we support people in the Sahtu asserting their rights and certainly they deserve economic opportunities. I’ve never spared an opportunity to say, “People there need economic opportunities because their families matter too.” I stand by that and I will always stand by that.
I will tell you, I was quite upset hearing the characterization that this was taking away or denying opportunities. As far as saying Yellowknife against the regions, the real technicality about this is Yellowknife represents approximately 45 percent of the population, so Yellowknife could not take away the opportunity of the territory. A true vote, there’s a majority of people outside of Yellowknife.
Again, this was never about Yellowknife against anyone. This is about how do we want to do business and how do we plan to do business.
As I said earlier, the fracking regulations talk about how to frack, not the merits of fracking. They talk about how to frack, not why shouldn’t we do this. We should never find this funny and we should never be gloating as we see the numbers laid out before ourselves. This is an important issue. As I said earlier, if we couldn’t use the Plebiscite Act to do something like this, then why even have it some days?
I did hear the number of $1.8 million. That is not a true number. People can keep saying it and they can repeat it as much as they want, but it doesn’t make it true. Now, would it cost $1.8 million to run the whole election? Absolutely. If you ran a stand-alone plebiscite? Probably. I don’t know. But I can tell you, the research into adding a valid question at the ballot box is $17,500, and that is for the printing of ballots and that’s associated with the organization thereof, because they’re already doing an election and they already have a ballot box and they can run it concurrently.
There are no hidden costs. I appreciate the fact that people are worried about hidden costs, but that is simply it: $17,500. As I said earlier, I’ve seen us spend way more money on things that are way more questionable.
Mr. Speaker, as I wrap it up I am going to stress that I’ve heard my colleagues. I do appreciate and certainly respect their opinions. Many of them I don’t agree with, but, hey, I suspect there’s many a time they don’t always agree with my opinion. But what we’re missing here, in closing, is the fact that we’re missing a great opportunity to reach out to the public and hear them. I worry, as people vote against this motion, we’ve silenced the public in a very constructive way.
As I said earlier today, this is a black and white definitive way of deciding how the Northwest Territories wants to go forward, and for people to blame the economy about stuff not happening here today should not have any effect on the chance, if not the great opportunity, to make good public policy. Good public policy should stand the test of time and certainly should stand the test of good times before us.
Mr. Speaker, I already asked for a recorded vote, so I look forward to seeing the final outcome of the results. Thank you.