Michael McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is correct; the ferry at Fort Simpson and other locations over the years have been put on a scheduled service. The intention was to see if it would result in some savings in terms of fuel. Over the last couple of months, I directed out staff to do an analysis of whether that is the case to see if there is any positive results of having scheduled service versus on-call and on-demand service. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I’m not sure if I heard a question in there. We have certainly agreed with some of the principles that were mentioned by the honourable Member regarding prevention. We have a number of programs that are earmarked towards the youth at risk. We are also looking at ways we could encourage our youth to become good leaders, good role models. We’ve started a number of programs that encourage that and we continue to work with our youth in setting up conferences where they can speak up and have their voices heard. We’ve also embarked on setting up a Youth Ambassador Program that we...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, being elected to public office is something that we should not take lightly. A lot of people think being elected to public office is a popularity contest, but I don’t agree with that. I think people now see a lot more to it than that. That being said, Mr. Speaker, when we are elected we should be held accountable to the very people that represent us. I always like to think that I am a reflection of the community that I represent. By the same token, Cabinet is a representative of this side of the House. We elect the Cabinet Members, we put them there, and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Once again, we'll have somebody go see if the signs have been changed, or, if I'm not correct, we will ensure that parking nameplates are in the proper places. The stall for the Minister is there because we do a lot of work and do a lot of business at the airport. If the travelling public spends as much time as I do there, maybe we'd have to take a look at that, but that's why we have a stall reserved for the Minister. We don't have one for the Premier; however, we do have one for the RCMP. We will go there and check to see if all the nameplates are in the proper...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am not sure which bright, shiny sign the Member is referring to. We have small, little signs…

---Laughter

…on a couple of parking stalls and one is for the Minister of Transportation and the other one is for the RCMP. We don’t have one for the Premier. We have two parking stalls that are dedicated, one for the government and one for the RCMP.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thanks to the Premier for that. I would encourage him to continue to meet with the regional leaders because they are the leaders of all the regions of the NWT. I think it’s the only way we are going to be able to get some progress done on this.

With the naming of the new negotiator for Canada, are we starting…How far back are we starting? Are we starting from scratch, or has some of the work been carried forward from the negotiations with the previous government? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As you can tell by the number of questions today regarding the royalty agreement, it’s getting to be a big issue and something we have to work on very quickly. Along those lines, I would like to ask the Premier a couple of questions myself. In response to one of the questions, he mentioned six outstanding issues that they were dealing with. My question to the Premier is, who are these issues between? Is it between the territorial government and federal government, the territorial government and the aboriginal groups? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as I have indicated in my response earlier, I have directed the staff to see if there is any benefit of having scheduled services. We will have those results over the winter and we will take direction from the results and move forward for the next season. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’d gladly work with the community of Behchoko to look at identifying the resources that that community needs. There is already some resources that we can, upfront, identify that has not been tapped into. There’s a number of other program dollars that we have that are available for the community to apply for through the youth core for some youth at risk programs. We also have youth contributions. We also have a youth advisor. We have trapper training programs and this year we’ve launched a website that will be coming on stream this fall. That can be certainly a...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, over the last couple of years we’ve been working hard in the department to expand our youth programs. Last year we were able to expand our program funding by another half a million dollars to run a number of pilot projects. We have a number of projects that have been very successful. Over this last while, a lot of communities have been applying for the Community Initiatives Program, which has a budget of $1 million to use towards building and constructing of infrastructure and these have included youth drop-in centres or youth centres. We’ve...