Bob McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I guess the big number in the Devolution Agreement is the amount of money. Obviously, we want as many people or federal incumbents that are in those jobs to come over. But at the end of the day, we make the decision of how many jobs we will have. Obviously, we will be making job offers and the agreement requires us to make sure that every federal employee that comes over is no worse off than they are now financially, and we are required to adhere to that for three years. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

It seems like just yesterday that some of the Members from across the way were quoting from the Commissioner of the Environment, who was complaining about the fact that the federal government was only doing 20 percent of the required land inspections. I’m sure we can do better than that, but if the Member wants us to maintain that level, we can do that too.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, to both parts.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think every Member in this House should be responsible for whatever they bring into this House. If you bring in something written by another person or party that has references to individuals, you should be held responsible to make sure that you don’t refer to individuals. Otherwise, we could all get individuals to write letters and we could read them out holus-bolus without any form of control. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I’m quite prepared to do that, if committee obviously agrees with that, that they want me to go out and make these announcements to the public before I get feedback from them. In an abundance of caution, I will wait until I hear back from committee.

We do have quite a number of committees that are working on all these different issues and we’ll be providing that information in the very near future. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I thought my next task was to go out and find all the missing caribou, but I’ll take a detour and talk about 911. I agree that a 911 system would serve residents well in protecting and preserving public safety. As a government, we’ve been focusing on trying to build capacity in smaller communities, and to provide for some emergency and safety services.

I guess the question in my mind is if we do have a framework, if we do hire a call centre in Edmonton and we get a call from a small community calling Edmonton, how do we get a responder in a small centre if we don’t have...

We have already faced those types of situations where we’ve identified positions and we’ve wanted to put them in communities, and due to a lack of infrastructure, lack of housing, lack of office space, we couldn’t find any place to put them. So a lot of times we have to park people in other centres. I think that we expect that, on a number of occasions when we do devolution and transfer positions, we may have to park people in larger centres that have the capacity before we develop additional infrastructure in other centres. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m very pleased this day has come, because now we can answer all the hard questions.

This is something that we’ve planned for. Obviously, I’ve said it many times in this Assembly, that decentralization is a priority for this government. There are already approximately 175 federal government positions that are located in the Northwest Territories, and there will be approximately the same amount of positions that will be transferred to the Northwest Territories. We’ve been working on our organizational design. We expect to have at least four new departments, and we have...

Right now I’m focused on getting the final devolution deal done to have implementation. But I have spoken to a significant number of media and every one of them asks about becoming a province. Obviously, the Northwest Territories is the only jurisdiction in Canada that has a declining population. If we went to become a province, we’re going to have to turn that around. I look at Alberta. When Alberta became a province in the 1930s, they had a population of about 100,000. I expect that with all the potential for development and the tremendous resource potential, the road that we’re going to...