Bob McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We appreciate those comments and we are going to continue to work hard to continue to improve. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. That’s our intention, recognizing that not all of the communities have quotas. You need to have quotas, for example, for commercial fisheries, and a lot of times, working with the federal Department of Fisheries, we can get them to set a quota as to what your quota is what you catch kind of approach. So that’s one area that we can work closely together on. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

That is not our intention to train persons with disabilities on sensitivity training. We are involving them so we can learn from them. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

As soon as this budget is approved, we have identified funds to allow us to do that to develop local markets for fish, and I think one of the best places to start would be to work with my colleagues that have institutional facilities and get them to start purchasing fish and other commercial country food that is available and start serving it. Thank you.

We’ll commit to providing that information one way or the other. Thank you.

I’m a big fan of strategizing or developing visions in every sector and, certainly, we can review the vision that was developed when we were all elected. There have been a lot of areas that we’ve been pushing very hard on: the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, for example, the Mackenzie Valley Highway, the Taltson Dam. I could name a whole host of projects that we’ve been working and pushing very hard on the federal government and we can certainly expand our horizons in a whole bunch of different areas, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.

Thank you. It’s a directive that is approved by Cabinet and it’s updated from time to time. We do keep track of the number of direct appointments and we do review the criteria to make sure that it’s fulfilling the objectives of what it was intended to do and we do have direct appointments for a number of reasons. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I’m certainly pleased that you used the reference of Saskatchewan, because to attract investors you don’t just wave a magic wand and people appear. You have to have a strategy; you have to have resources; you have to have people; and you have to have programs that cost money and will attract investors into the Northwest Territories. I think that we can all borrow a page from Saskatchewan. If we had additional resources we could go out and lobby all of the different sectors that are out there that potentially are looking at building new facilities. We could lobby the federal government. We’ve...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think that’s largely a function of the hard work of the staff in the department and working very closely with all the staff at all of the different departments of the government. It’s helped quite a bit working with the committees and focusing on improving service delivery. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I’m quite prepared to do that and we’ve been calling as recently as last night or yesterday to attempt to set up meetings. So the next step would be to have our staff go to Fort Resolution and meet with as many people as possible.

We still want to develop a park in that area, because we think it’s something that would be beneficial and certainly fit in with the attractiveness around Fort Resolution. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.