Bob McLeod

As a government we subsidize the cost of living in the Northwest Territories to the tune of approximately $200 million annually and the food subsidy program goes directly to food retailers in 11 communities, Paulatuk, Sachs Harbour, Ulukhaktok, Tuktoyaktuk, Aklavik, Norman Wells, Fort Good Hope, Tulita, Deline, Colville Lake and Trout Lake and a partial subsidy goes to Whati, Lutselk’e and Gameti. Our government provides approximately $1 million towards nutritional education programs. Thank you.

Thank you. When I floated the idea over the past couple of months, there was very little support for it. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

As a government, we have taken a very strategic approach to decentralization. We have taken a very measured and conservative approach as opposed to we’re not moving whole departments holus-bolus from Yellowknife to a small, isolated community. We are taking a very strategic, measured approach so that at the end of the day when we have completed decentralization, decentralization will continue into the near future, at least the next two or three years, that we’ll see that decentralization has been very successful in the Northwest Territories.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I believe that they work on 10-year implementation plans. Our government implementation people meet on a regular basis with the Sahtu to make sure that the implementation plans are achieving the results that they’re supposed to. They are updated every 10 years. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. The Third-Party Accountability Framework is a government policy framework, and generally it’s up to individual departments to apply it. In this way there is consistency across the government, and if there is an NGO, I guess they deal with individual departments.

I’m pleased to say that we have decentralized 150 jobs to the regions and to the communities. We have a retention policy so that any employees that are affected were incumbents of decentralized positions that would prefer to remain in their existing position are given priority hire so that they can stay in their community of choice. They have the benefit of getting priority hire, so I don’t believe we’ve lost any employees that have moved to the South because of decentralization.

The federal government has agreed to pause at their end to allow us to work with the Lutselk'e and we expect to have some results by the end of March or early April that would indicate whether we’re moving forward or not.

That’s our hope too. We have 280 days left in our mandate and certainly that would be something we are aspiring to, if we can reach some sort of agreement before the end of our term, the 17th Legislative Assembly. That’s what we aspire to. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m very pleased to recognize my oldest brother, John McLeod, as well as Grand Chief Herb Norwegian and all of the Dehcho First Nations delegation.

I think we already approved the implementation section. But devolution was a fairly seamless transition and it hasn’t resulted in any increased requirements for funding under implementation. Most of the implementation is for implementation of land claims or self-government.