Floyd Roland

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We’ll provide a list of the Metis locals and the funding that’s been applied. One of the things we have is a condition on the funding that they need to be in good standing with the societies and we’re finding many of the groups have now started signing up and getting their paper back in order. There are 17 in total, but we’ll get the information out on paper.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Earlier we discussed this area of the Stabilization Fund. There is a call that goes out annually. There are areas that are reviewed and the applications that go into four general areas, applications, regions of the NWT, the type of support being requested including management costs or governance costs, organizational development costs, extraordinary general operations costs, whether ongoing personal costs are being requested, and whether the proposed projects had not received support or where the same or similar of those supported last year for the same NGO. That doesn...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think the Member is reverting back to his previous position as a negotiator on file, and, I mean, I respect the Member’s right to voice his concerns and advocate for the groups. I must say that we all represent communities and we’re elected to a public government and everyone in our communities. None of us are elected by one group specific, although, yes, there are significant people within our communities of one Aboriginal group or another.

Let’s go down the list, Mr. Chair. Norman Wells: two-thirds of that is under royalty regime. The groups that have signed the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have no persons who have declared a disability. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, the Government of the Northwest Territories supported the signing of the UN Declaration as an aspirational document. In fact, I understand that the federal government is now considering signing that same document. For ourselves, as the Government of the Northwest Territories, we are Aboriginal Affairs within the Government of the Northwest Territories and we ensure departments are following and fulfilling their obligations or informing them of those obligations and then we go to the appropriate department to hold them accountable to those agreements. As the Government of the...

I think that’s the unique feature of this regional leaders approach. It hasn’t been the Government of the Northwest Territories that sets the agenda; it is a collaborative approach. We ask every region if they have a specific item or issue that they want to have dealt with. In some cases, we’ve dealt with the education piece or the Water Strategy or the Wildlife Act, to a certain degree, about who’s going to be involved and not and can they put the right people to the table. In fact, one of the agenda items we had as a regular update was the agreement-in-principle and at some meetings there...

Again, the Northern Leaders’ Forum was a side table on Creating Our Future Together. The regional leaders’ table is the one we’re working with and reaching out to the regional leaders and community leaders on that. Quite clearly, as we’ve shown already, the Sahtu have not signed this agreement, but they wanted to have meetings where they brought the elders, youth and representatives from many of their communities to discuss the AIP and go over it. We’ve cost-shared the initial meeting and are looking at following up with an additional meeting that brings in the rest of their communities. One...

I guess this is where I can say maybe some of our diligent work has caused concern amongst the groups that they’re looking at the agreement-in-principle and that the net fiscal benefit portion on resource revenue sharing is a way of making up the gap that we’ve identified. It was through this department that we looked at all the negotiations that are going around in the Northwest Territories, the items of discussion at those tables and we did a, it was, I would say, a conservative figure about the shortfall that we would be seeing if there was not enough funding put in place and what we were...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It has been Mr. Stewart who has been working with a number of the staff in our office to prepare the work and respond to many of the concerns that have been arising through a number of the meetings and the ongoing work as well. Short of giving his phone number out, he has been directly involved, and with an executive contact list, I’m sure they’ve already have got him on speed dial. Thank you.

The Northern Leaders’ Forum, we came to the Assembly, got the budget, and as I explained to Members when we went through that process initially, what we thought we would do is one large process and I came back and informed Members that the regional leaders said they knew best what was happening in their regions, so we divvied up the budget to provide regional leaders. For example, this is the way it worked out -- and we’ll get a written document together, a draft that will show. There’s a base amount where everybody got the equal base amount of $19,000. There was a cost of living differential...