Robert C. McLeod

My understanding is all applications are vetted through a pretty similar process where we do our consultations with the local First Nation government to gather comments and concerns on the project proposal and it usually takes about 45 days to go through this process. So again, my understanding is the application process is pretty well the same. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Lands role in that would be to take the applications and go through the process with them. My understanding is that we distribute the application for comments from the local First Nations governments and other people who are involved and we take those comments and decide what next steps we have to do and whether to proceed with the application or not, or if there are other requirements that the applicant has to fill out. Thank you.

As far as the repayment plan goes, that’s something that the land owners would have to work out, I think, in some of the smaller communities with Finance, because I believe it’s through Finance that it’s administered. In some of the larger communities it’s through the community government.

As far as the second part goes, I’m not going to attempt to answer that because I’m really not sure. We have a whole suite of programs that have different rules for market and non-market communities, zone A, B and C. We have different criteria for a lot of different areas across the NWT. We try to tailor it...

This program has been in effect since 2007. We’ve had about 250 youth ambassadors go through this program. There have been 27 youth ambassador projects. We’re coming up on 10 years here soon, and we’ve had some discussions of maybe doing a 10-year anniversary booklet or something to do exactly as the Member stated, just to measure some of the success we’ve had in the program. But we also have the proud2bnwt youth website, and that suggestion has some merit to it. We could possibly post a lot of the success stories on there, because this is a program that we as a government should be quite...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think of all the programs that are run through the GNWT, the Youth Ambassador Program is one of the best. This is one program that’s going to have long-term benefits for the people of NWT. A lot of these young people are going to be our future leaders. In my time in interacting with them, I think the future of the NWT is in good hands.

To the question, the sport and recreation youth staff are constantly in contact with a lot of the youth ambassador alumni and potential youth ambassadors just to support and encourage them to pursue a healthy lifestyle and set goals and...

My information is there are 11 youth ambassadors who have been hired as summer students and have completed internships. There are six former youth ambassadors who are actually employed within the GNWT, and some of the successes you can measure. We have some youth ambassadors who are holding councillor positions within community governments, and there are some that are executive directors of NGOs. We’ve had some that have taken international volunteer placements and many have had academic scholarships and bursaries. Many of them are in volunteer roles in the community. We’ve had four youth...

We will have discussions with all those that provide the service to see what their plans are and see where we can go from there. Obviously, as I stated before, telecommunication is improving across the Northwest Territories. It is getting to a point where you go out on the land now and you still have cell phone access, so that part of it is improving, and once we do that work we will take the next step in the work that we are doing around the 911, the update that we are giving to committee on our way forward. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’d like to see all of our communities have access to cellular service. I think it’s improved quite a bit in the last couple of years. As far as what we’re trying to do, we would obviously work closely with those that are providing the service, have them inform us as to what their future plans are. Thank you.

That is not our call as to improving the cell phone coverage. Obviously, that is the providers’ plans. We can work with them to see what their plans are and we give committee an update on some of the work we are doing. If we have conversations with providers, we can pass some of that information on to committee. Thank you.

Improving our telecommunications was one of our challenges when we first had the discussion on 911. Since then, telecommunication has improved quite a bit. We have had a report commissioned. The report is done and we are looking forward to having some time before committee to give them an update on some of the work that we are doing and some of our plans going forward. Thank you.