Katrina Nokleby

Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Speaker. I welcome you and my colleagues back for another productive session. I rise today to give thanks to all the hardworking and dedicated people who have spent the last few weeks fighting fires in the South Slave, dealing with the flooding in the Beaufort Delta, and supporting evacuees barely one year after they coped with the devastating floods.

My heart breaks for the people of the K'atlodeeche First Nation. Not only did they suffer from the flooding last year, with some of them still not in their homes, but now they've also lost significant infrastructure...

I find that quite an interesting answer, Mr. Speaker, given that I've been cc'd on the correspondence between the Minister and the fishers regarding this exact situation. There is a line of communication that comes from dealing with entities that have executive directors, that have managers, etcetera, and to go outside of that to other people within that organization, to circumvent or undermine the leadership, is inappropriate, Mr. Speaker. The Minister needs to get her staff under control. I will leave it as a comment. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the Minister being brief. There's been a lot of Ministers' statements in QP today.

My next question has to do with that support for the fishers. It's my understanding out of a recent meeting, there is a long list of unmet obligations by the Department of ITI with respect to the fishers and the fish plant. So can the Minister speak with what is being done to meet those action items that were discussed with the fishers and ensuring that they have a healthy fishery? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'd like to recognize Jamie Linington, the interim general manager of the Tu Cho Cooperative and president of the Freshwater Fish Harvesters Association which is a newly incorporated entity that is looking to transform the national entity into a harvesterled one. Jamie is also an intergenerational Metis fisherowner operator and is unfortunately one of the evacuees from Hay River, which was good news for me because I got to catch up with her in person. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to just thank the committee for the work on this. That's not one that I sit on. And I think this just comes back to, I think, two years ago asking the Minister if we were going to get some of our languages on, like, Google and Google Translate. And I have to say, actually, since that time I've noticed there are more resources online that I can look up certain words in Inuktitut or Inuvialuit sorry, I'm not getting any I won't even try today. And so therefore, you know, I just see that this is such a great thing. Teachers are very collaborative. They're...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Spring has sprung. According to some calendars, spring arrived last week however to those of us living in the North, it usually waits a little bit longer. We are blessed with the return of longer days, and spring is a beautiful yet challenging at this time of year. As the snow melts on the streets and in our yards, on community trails and on ice roads, it reveals how we weathered the winter season.

Spring can be a metaphor of the past season. Potholes are a given. It is a right of passage of living here however as the snow slowly melts away, we see our beautiful Mother...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise to also celebrate Tim today in his retirement. Not only have most of the things I was going to speak about even my jokes have been stolen by the other side in that Mr. Mercer was always providing us with advice; I just probably didn't take it very often. So as one of the Members that definitely has had one of the more tumultuous rides here in the Assembly, I first would like to apologize to Mr. Mercer for making his last few years here at the Assembly a very interesting and unpredictable one. I too did not have many interactions with the clerk's office as a...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I too just wanted to thank to take a moment to specifically thank or staff and anybody that did contribute to this report and the work that we've done. It was very weighty work and very heavy work at times and not only I think for us listening but for people who have to actually come in and share trauma. And it's known that people having to relive and over and over telling their stories that that in itself at times can be very traumatizing. So I do really want to thank the staff particularly because I think there was a real sorry, I'm a bit out of breath, Madam...

Thank you, Madam Chair. And I appreciate the willingness of the Minister and the department to try and rectify the issue that we had raised and clearly was listening to what our concerns were. Again, though, this I don't necessarily, though, agree with 3(b) as authorized by the director. And the reason I have concern there is further to what I was saying yesterday about the way that this is going to be set up that it does allow for there to be an arbitrary GNWT employee who is making decisions about people's livelihoods in an industry. And I just don't see that we have a lot of that type of...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Well, I also just think this is a great idea for our people. I also think that there is an economic benefit for forgiving people's debt. And I've mentioned it here before. We've heard the conversation in the US around forgiving of student loans and how that will actually help with stimulating economy because money that would then be spent on interest and principal payments will then be back into the economy and being spent by people. And I'm always struck by how the communities operate, from what I see anyway, is that any time someone is doing well or has the...