Norman Yakeleya

Mr. Chair, I’m very encouraged by the Minister’s comments in terms of the possibility of this being a discussion at a Cabinet level and coming back to the community for a look at this issue here. I certainly appreciate the Minister’s support, I guess, from all around to increases. This is very important for our communities, to increase the funding for this type of project. So I want to say to the Minister that he’s done a good job in this area here. He has certainly listened to the people in this area here.

Mr. Chair, I want to speak to the Minister about the Mackenzie Valley Highway and the...

Mr. Speaker, as I said in my Member’s statement in terms of this government concluding its time in this Assembly here, is this a big enough decision? If we are going to make some changes into how we do the review of the rental of public housing, is it a big enough decision to leave it for the next government or can we make this decision within this government to go forward in terms of the next Assembly?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a follow up to Mr. Krutko’s questions. I want to talk about the energy policy. I understand that there is a hydro symposium planned in Deline to look at the different possibilities of the hydro. Hydro has a lot of potential in the Northwest Territories. Actually, in the GNWT’s website it says that the promise of hydro power in the Northwest Territories is estimated to be over 12,000 megawatts. That’s a lot of power that the Northwest Territories could tap into. So I want to ask the Minister here in terms of hydro potential in the North here. I’ll talk a little bit...

The Oscar Bridge has been there for a number of years and now the Minister is saying that’s going to be part of a PDR report that will take another couple more years, so it seems that this bridge is just being shuffled on to different areas. So I want to just leave it at that.

I want to ask about the Bear River Bridge that has been an issue with people in Norman Wells and Tulita. I know the Minister has tried several approaches to see how funding could be secured to the Bear River Bridge. People are quite upset that they didn’t get support from this House to put the Bear River Bridge in the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question is to the Minister of the Housing Corporation. I just want to follow up on my Member’s statement and our discussion yesterday. I want to ask the Minister in regards to the review of the rental issue here. Will the Minister confirm to me and to the House here that the purpose of the rental review is to reduce the cost of living for the public housing tenants and not to increase their costs?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just for clarification on this one here, I take it these positions are in the South Slave and are to do with our office in Hay River that people are responsible for the potential Mackenzie Gas Project. These are the positions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to ask about the Minister’s safety program in terms of the winter road in my region about installing safety road signs between the communities. I know that there were some done in the past year and I wanted to ask the Minister how many signs are they going to be looking at installing this year during the winter road season.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The one comment I have is from the Minister. Is there any type of further discussion with the operations in regards to marine support services in regards to the development of the Alberta tar sands. We talked about this marine barge or boat coming down the Mackenzie River, I don’t quite know the name right now of this company, it is NTCL and some company that are doing work in the Alberta tar sands that they want to bring some huge, humongous boats down the Mackenzie River. Has there been any type of discussions? It has been fairly quiet so maybe it is a good thing. I...

Mr. Chairman, the other issue I wanted to focus on is the Norman Wells Airport building. Mr. Chairman, it is my understanding that the building is going to make some changes in terms of accommodating some of the people that have to fly into Norman Wells to catch the Canadian North flight south to Edmonton or to here for medical reasons. Sometimes when we have patients coming in earlier during the day, they have to stay three or four hours at the airport because they are unable to get to town or just some people are left at the airport. One of the things that we looked at was to see if we can...

I wasn’t aware that Cooper had made the attempt to look at a regular service schedule, on demand, and...(inaudible)...maybe unfeasible and the community, the region, I’ll have to go back and check and see if it’s something that they want me to continue to push from this government here to say we want to look at this. Maybe the department may not want... I mean, a lot of things that we don’t want them to do they still do. So we have to have a little bit of flexibility there in terms of what we’re asking for. I will just leave it at that and I will do some of my own checking and my own research...