Norman Yakeleya

Thank you. I’ll wait until the Minister gets the information back to me.

Thank you. Can the Minister provide to me and the House in terms of types of specifically cultural programs that could be used in our small communities which are primarily in my region, primarily Aboriginal communities in regard to how to deal with these types of issues and if there are ways that they involve elders through the languages?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to talk about how badly we need our youth in the Northwest Territories today to stay alive. Mr. Speaker, it’s very hard in our small communities, and I’m pleading right now to the youth in the Northwest Territories. There are families right now in the North that are dealing with issues of suicide, family violence, drugs and alcohol and with our youth. There are families right now that need help and our youth are so valuable and they’re bombarded with so many issues.

Mr. Speaker, I had to deal with one in Colville Lake and I’m asking the youth how hard sometimes...

Mr. Chairman, I certainly appreciate that from the Minister. I know that another area that I need to talk about and because this is an operation and maintenance budget, I have...(inaudible)...in terms of at least the planning of the operations and maintenance. Anyhow, I won’t get into the details.

I want to tell the Minister that if they had a hospital or services that I saw firsthand in Edmonton... I appreciate the Territories have a staff person at our hospital. She was very helpful with some of the stuff I had to deal with. It sure does make a big difference when you are out looking at...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to say to the Minister, in terms of the health care services in our small communities and some of the equipment that I’ve seen, now it certainly shows that there’s a great improvement to the health centres. There’s actually some equipment there that’s beneficial to the people and their residents. I really want to thank the Minister for putting those in our communities. It makes a big difference when we have people come to our health centres on an emergency basis and there’s actually equipment there that’s being used by our nurses now. They’re very appreciative of...

Mr. Chairman, I want to ask the Minister regarding the change of the health benefits programs that we’re administering. I know that puts a lot of pressure onto our financial pocket here in the GNWT in terms of how that rolls out. I want to ask the Minister about the challenges that we’re going to see changing the program and if that puts any constraint onto some of the programs we want to see in our communities or resources in our communities such as the community of Colville Lake having a nurse there or having a social worker there. We just seem to be operating on the accessibility from Fort...

Certainly the Town of Norman Wells and myself are very pleased that the Premier/Minister is making commitments to come to Norman Wells to talk to the Town of Norman Wells on these issues.

I want to ask the Minister about the backup system and the adequacy of the power plant. Is that something that’s going to be looked into right away? I know there were discussions to see how fit this power plant could be of use to the community if the power does go out in the next week or so.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you, honourable colleagues. I’d like to ask questions to the Minister of NTPC, Mr. Roland, about the incident that happened in Norman Wells in late December with the outage of power. I want to ask the Minister if he has had a briefing from his officials on an update as to some of the concerns that were stated in the January 7th letter to the Premier about the situation that happened in Norman Wells with the power outage.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The people of Norman Wells were in the dark on December 21st not just because the sun went down early that day but because the town lost power around 5:00 p.m. and it was out for almost three hours. The backup generators did not come on.

NTPC dispatched a crew from Fort Simpson but it did not arrive in time. Where was our government?

It was 30 below and the town nearly faced a state of emergency. Where was our government?

Imperial Oil supplied power to Norman Wells and was having problems with its turbine. Imperial Oil has three turbines to support its operations. On...

Mr. Speaker, can the Minister provide to the House if there is any type of analysis as to why NTPC does not have representation in the Sahtu, specifically a request to have one in Norman Wells? I know there are personnel in Inuvik, Fort Simpson and Fort Smith that have to fly into the region for situations like this. Can he bring that also to the attention of the regions, how we could have representation in Norman Wells to expand our support services to the communities?