Norman Yakeleya

I also look forward to the Minister working with the federal minister or the federal government with the fish up in Fort Good Hope. I know there was some concern in Fort Good Hope as to the quality of their fish. I heard also in Tulita from a gentleman who lives in Fort Resolution, that he talked about the fish in the Great Slave Lake and some of the fish that they were catching weren’t quite healthy. The first time that this gentleman, and he’s an older gentleman and he could be considered an elder, but the quality of the fish that they caught, they didn’t look quite right.

I want to know if...

Mr. Speaker, I understand the teacher from Colville Lake really didn’t want to come back to town. He wanted to stay out there and be a trapper. Mr. Speaker, would the Minister undertake the issue to meet with this colleague, Minister of Education, to see if this Take a Kid Trapping or Take a Kid Harvesting Program could somehow be included and part of the education in terms of solidifying this program like a trades program that some of the young people do want to become trappers? That is an honourable career choice of theirs to do something for themselves. Would the Minister sit down with the...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The concerns again brought to me by the elders of the community of Colville Lake, they’ve stated to me many times they’re concerned about wildlife technicians, biologists using the collars to monitor the movements of caribou, especially the ones that we use in the Sahtu, Bluenose-East and Bluenose-West, and that the feeling that their method of traditional knowledge is not taken very seriously as the aircraft and collars are used on caribou to give credence and evidence to the scientific papers on caribou. There is some value to it. Again, it rubs against the respect for...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to ask the Minister of ITI, with this program Take a Kid Trapping, I said in my Member’s statement the value of cultural and Aboriginal programs into the schools. I want to ask the Minister of ITI if in the future the success of this program will also include the success in terms of increasing the funding so that this program can be more permanent into the educational programs in schools.

So in a few months I certainly hope we have a lively debate on this program review in terms of this issue. Hopefully we’ll formulate a new policy in terms of the harvesters and the land and area that we’re talking about that we’d see it before the end of the life of this government. If this has been an issue in the past, I can only imagine the departments have been working quite creatively to put this compensation to test in terms of working with the harvesters on areas that have been damaged by forest fires. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to ask, have we been fairly active with our forest fire damage compensation? Have we been giving it to people applying for that compensation?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to ask the Minister, they had a biomass report, sorry, wood pellet district heating study done in the Territories, October 2010, four months ago, by the Arctic Energy Alliance. In the budget here there’s $1.3 million for the biomass energy, page 13-18. The report states what they found to be deficient, dare I say, in terms of supporting district heating in communities that would be beneficial. I want to ask the Minister are there plans to go forward with this report and look at communities such as Gameti, Whati, Tulita, Fort Good Hope and Tuktoyaktuk to look at...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to take the time and the opportunity out of the Committee of the Whole to recognize my older brother up in the gallery, Raymond Yakeleya, who has come to see the proceedings of the House. Thank you.

I’d like to ask the Minister about this section. Mr. Chair, the operations in Deline, there were some units that weren’t quite finished and completed. I went there a couple of weeks ago and the people were still out of those public housing units. They’re still boarded up, so to speak; no one was in them. I wanted to know why is that? They said it would only be a couple weeks, a couple months, now it’s been months and months and months and the people haven’t moved back into their rental units. I’m pretty sure that maybe it might get done this spring or maybe this summer. Can I ask the Minister...

I want to ask the Minister, there’s support from this House and several industries across Canada and the Northwest Territories. I want to ask the Minister if, when he had his discussion with Minister Strahl, can the Minister inform the House if in his discussions with Minister Strahl he came to why the federal government is not supporting the Mackenzie Valley Highway by putting serious dollars to build it even after the PDRs that we pretty well closed. Why isn’t the federal government supporting this?