Katrina Nokleby

As you can see in the mandate, this program will be developed going forward. I believe the idea is that we look at, say, small businesses or certain types of industry where there are people accessing our ITI programs in order to provide funding to get their business going, or to learn some certain aspects of the business. We would be looking to create a program where we could partner up successful businesspeople or successful tradespeople, or whatever program it might be under, that we then can partner them to these entrepreneurs or these new emerging businesses, so that they can learn from...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It's my understanding that the Tlicho Government was involved with the negotiation of the numbers and the quota for the Tlicho All-Season Road, so I cannot speak specifically to why those numbers were not as the Member would like to see. However, I believe, as the Cabinet and all of us together, all 19 of us together, have made retaining our government dollars in the North and maximizing them for the benefits of all residents of the Northwest Territories a priority that we are committed to, one that I am personally committed to, I think that the Member will see that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have enough on my plate without ENR, so, yes, thank you .

---Laughter

It is my understanding that Northwest Territories Tourism, they are a destination marketing organization, they are actually at this point continuing to market to China, as not the entire country of China has been impacted by this. So it is our plan to continue with marketing toward China and Chinese tourists. As well, we will work with the Chinese tourism counterparts to ensure that we can communicate with them that we want them to come to the Northwest Territories, that we are still committed to...

Fair enough. I may be a little bit optimistic in using the word "vibrant," and I acknowledge that. I would like to hope that we will continue to see a good season. However, I do acknowledge what the Member is saying in that there is no way I could predict that at this time. Again, I also cannot fully answer what metrics will be collected. Obviously, we will be looking at things like direct impacts to airfare, cancellations on airlines; we will be looking at asking the hotels, et cetera, to provide numbers for their types of cancellations, and such; so I assume that there will be a fairly...

Let me just clarify my point, then. While I said that I did not feel like we would have a great or a full understanding of the entire impacts until the fall, I am sure that we will be apprising the public and the Members -- we will be; I will commit to that -- prior to the fall. As we start to collect the data and we can analyze it and look, we will commit to updating the Members as we progress through that data analysis, and I will commit to it being a robust data collection. As an engineer, I love data, so I will commit to that to the Member.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We do know that there will be impacts as a result of the coronavirus. However, at this time, we don't have those numbers in front of us, and we don't feel like we will really have the full picture until likely around the fall of this year, when we can look at the numbers for the season and see where we are at. I would like to remind that, while we do have a lot of Chinese visitors and they do play an important role in our tourism sector, we do have people coming from other locations around the world. While this will impact our tourism sectors and we will feel the impact...

The mentorship program has not been developed yet, so they are open to any sorts of suggestions. One thing that I have found with ITI is they are definitely not a "this is the way it has to be" kind of department. They are pretty flexible in some -- well, you can ask Kevin, but they are very flexible sometimes in their ways of doing it. When we have been discussing all of these sorts of changes that we are going to be doing, a lot of it will be end user feedback. I have had that conversation a lot with the department, so if there is a need, and clearly, if we are going to talk about business...

We feel taxiing down the runway does not pose a significant delay and thus can perform fire suppression activities accordingly.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department talked with the Northern Air Transport Association, or NATA, and Northwestern Air Lease and Air Tindi are members of that association. The runway level of service did not change, therefore the aircraft used by Air Tindi and Northwestern Air Lease were not impacted. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Fort Smith airport is designed for a 737. The geophysical features allow the operation of water bombers; the same level of service is maintained. Every aircraft that can land in Hay River can also land in Fort Smith. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.