Bill Braden

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Justice.

Please provide data available regarding trends in drug-related offences, court appearances, jail terms, Legal Aid files and social services intervention, such as child apprehensions. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would certainly like to see a plan that is well designed and that everybody buys into as our goal, instead of speed on this one. I look forward to the developing plan.

Mr. Speaker, it was kind of interesting as well to hear about the progress of the northern strategy, but also the creation of an expert panel which is going to be looking at equalization and territorial formula financing models. These are two very big and far-reaching processes, Mr. Speaker. Is there any potential for conflict between the northern strategy process and this one regarding financing and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We had a very interesting day yesterday led by the Premier’s report from his meetings, along with our Minister of Finance in Ottawa. I would like to direct a couple of questions to the Premier with regard to the processes underway for putting together long-term strategies for the North.

We all know, Mr. Speaker, in the Throne speech of some weeks ago that the initiative was undertaken by the federal government to look at a new pan-northern strategic plan for Canada’s northern regions. The Premier supplied us with some further information on this. One of the points...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am going to speak in favour of the motion. There are some aspects of it that I would like to lend some ideas or some observations to.

First, as Mr. Ramsay has said, I think most of us have encountered some kind of contact, direct or indirect, with the situation that’s going on on the streets. I can relate at least to Yellowknife. In fact, just the other night, I was at an evening event at one of the highrise office buildings in downtown Yellowknife. As I left the building at about 8:30 or so, around the corner were four young people smoking up something and the bit of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Aside from assigning some people to this program or to the process of designing the strategy, I wonder if there is any anticipation or are we going to be called on to actually put dollars on the table to help us proceed. Will this cost us anything, Mr. Speaker? Thank you.

Okay. I guess this leaves me wondering, and I think it shouldn’t leave the communities wondering and the volunteers and the many participants in our sport and recreation system wondering, Mr. Speaker, why we are taking this step. It has been a torturous journey for the creation of this council, but we really have the thinnest and most skeletal of arrangements for how it is going to work. When can the Minister bring back to this Assembly a better plan and a framework for how it is going to work, and how we will be able to gauge its success? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Yes, Mr. Speaker. The creation of this council, it seems, is something very much driven by the government. The history was one of expectations and things that people from various sectors, various communities and regions thought should be in there but weren’t quite being delivered on. I would like to probe again just what is the mandate of this council and how is it going to improve the delivery of sport and recreation services in the NWT. The mandates, please, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Every northerner watches daily, nervously, as the world price of oil rises. It looks more and more like it's going to settle in the $50 U.S. a barrel range, and that means yet more dollars out of pockets for essential heat and transportation and fewer dollars for the other necessities of life. We look at a world suffering more and more from the effects of pollution from fossil fuels, how it affects our health and the environment around us, and we know that our northern regions, Mr. Speaker, are going to take the earliest and the most severe hit from global warming.

We...

Because it’s the kind of inaction that on this side of the House I don’t want to tolerate any more from this government. I’m sending a signal.

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Mr. Speaker, I believe in a good security system for the travelling public in Canada. I believe northerners are prepared to pay a share of it, but I object to being handed an open-ended invoice with no plan and, therefore, no confidence in how we’re going to implement this.

On a more fundamental issue, Mr. Speaker, related to this security business, all legislators must be on guard when independent security agencies can dictate conditions to...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The press reports from the activities in Ottawa earlier this week make quite an interesting package of reading. I was looking at a summary of the last day or two of coverage in the southern press. An interesting thing about the whole process, Madam Chair, is that it’s viewed in so many different ways depending on where you’re from in Canada and you’re perspectives or your expectations. The process does not seem to have really connected with a whole lot of certainty in the rest of Canada. We had one Premier literally storming out of the process, others saying that...