Michael McLeod

Mr. Speaker, the Member has raised, on a number of occasions during the session, concerns about recreation and recreation facilities in his community, and more recently raised and highlighted some concerns brought to him by the community of Lutselk’e. We’ve had people in the community over the last while and have been working with the community on putting some training programs together — ice-making and other things — to help support them.

There still seems to be some disconnect in terms of some of the funding arrangements and some of the support they think they need. I’d be glad to sit down...

Mr. Speaker, the new deal is here to stay. We expect the communities to be more independent through this program. We expect the communities would become municipal taxation authorities. That is the goal we set when we worked with the communities. They have been asking for that for many years, and that is the goal we have worked towards.

Mr. Speaker, we’ve been a supporter of the Northern Youth Abroad program since 2005. We partnered up with the Department of Education, Culture and Employment. We’ve been providing financial support and meeting on a regular basis to see some of the outcomes and have been very satisfied with what we are seeing. We’ve had a number of meetings and recently had some further discussions. We have decided that we will continue to support this program.

We as a government have committed to doing a lot of work in the area of infrastructure and infrastructure development and all the different aspects, including planning of budgets and looking at the costs and being able to accommodate the contracts so they get out earlier. I would be glad to try to include…. We’ve agreed that we will be as comprehensive as we can, and I’d be glad to bring the issue of the P3 forward to that committee for consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I’d have to go to the department to see what we have in place, but I’d venture to say that all P3 initiatives are done on a case-by-case basis. Thank you.

I thought I had been very clear and concise when I committed to take that on as part of our review. I’ll reinforce that by saying yes, we will take his advice and follow it up.

The whole area of capacity building has been one that has been brought forward as a concern. There are concerns regarding the number of available qualified SCOs. There is also the concern that was raised yesterday or the other day by the Member for Tu Nedhe about qualified recreation workers in the communities. We also need to have people who are qualified and certified in the area of finance.

We are working with LGANT, or Local Government Administrators of the Northwest Territories, to see what we can do. There have been a number of suggestions. One of them is to develop a pool of qualified...

Mr. Speaker, the program was designed with checks and balances so communities can continue to have input on areas of concern. We have already heard some early promise of that capacity. I think overall in the area of O&M and capital, we have stabilized the investment in the communities that communities are comfortable with. We have spent a lot of work in the area of building capacity and staffing problems. We have developed an evaluation framework, and we will be bringing that forward for discussion and having the communities adopt it so we can do the review in the next little while.

I see we’ve moved away from the youth abroad program and we’ve entered another line of questioning.

Mr. Speaker, the integrated communities sustainable plans are something we’ve worked on together with the federal government. We felt in order for the communities to be able to become sustainable and to become self-sufficient, they need to develop a number of plans. They are working on energy plans, capital plans and innovative initiatives within the communities. I’d certainly be glad to share the information, and possibly share some of the models we’ve come out with, with the Member, Mr. Speaker...

The infrastructure committee has been meeting since this government was formed and cabinet was selected. We have a lot of work in front of us. There is some desire to have some recommendations brought forward. We need to review a lot of the policies. We’d have to upgrade some of the policies. We’d have to also develop new ones. I’m trying to be very careful not to make a commitment we may not live by, but I would suspect that we could start presenting some of the initial findings very soon, hopefully by the next sitting.