Bob McLeod

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...

We haven’t worked that out yet. We’d have to talk to the two governments, at least.

I’m a very practical and pragmatic person, so before we start talking about a constitution, we need to get devolution done first.

We are still finalizing our draft communications and engagement plan, and our expectation is we will share it with committee. The principle is that when we go to the regions where the Aboriginal governments have not yet signed on to devolution, I expect that we will go to their communities with some representatives of the Dehcho First Nation Government and the Akaitcho First Nation Government. We have done it before so we would do it again. They’re the best governments to tell us and make sure we don’t infringe on any rights.

Well, I’ve said it before that we are the elected leaders of the Northwest Territories. We are here to represent the people of the Northwest Territories. I think we should stand up and be counted. I don’t think we should be running a government by plebiscite or by referendum.

No, I didn’t say that we expect no conflicting opinions. We’ve heard a lot of conflicting opinions, even here in this House. I’ve also said that we were going to put it to a vote here in this Legislative Assembly. If you have a conflicting opinion, you can tell us when we have our team going around to all the communities or you can tell your MLA.

Thank you. I’ll work very closely with my colleague, the Minister of MACA, and we’ll see how well or how many action plans we’ve developed. If our action plans are developed to the extent whereby we can move to the next level and if committee concurs that this would be a priority, then we would seriously look at this framework that the Member is talking about. Thank you.