Robert Hawkins

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was listening to the questions raised by our Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Jane Groenewegen. I like her approach on suggesting bulk purchasing and trying to leverage the expertise and skills that private industry have. My question would be to the Minister of Health and Social Services just to make sure -- of course, recognizing individual MLAs have every right to advocate for their businesses in their riding -- if the Department of Health and Social Services is going to continue this line of consideration which I would encourage them to do, it would make it an open...

Mr. Speaker, it is great to have initiatives with pittance of a dollar called investment that they referred to, but the reality is the customers aren’t picking that up. What work has the government done to ensure that this has actually taken any effect in this industry or any industry on this so-called market shift?

The problem still remains: the customers are not coming and these outfitters are left with all of these lodges that are difficult to staff. No one wants to work there because they know they can’t make any money. Has the Minister investigated the realities of this so-called bailout...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement I talked about our new endangered species, the outfitter, and the fact that they’ve been left not just holding the bag but worthless lodges, because of the direction that the caribou management has taken. Mr. Speaker, many of these lodges have the investment of many people, of generations of money, and are seen as their only opportunity for the future, but that opportunity has been pulled away.

Mr. Speaker, I’d like to ask the Minister of ITI what is this government’s plan to do with these outfitters with these worthless lodges while they cannot...

Mr. Speaker, if I could add one more issue to this particular problem in going forward, I would ask the Minister reach out to the Pharmacy Association of the Northwest Territories to engage maybe all their association and they could maybe leverage some of the expertise the association would have with their members and perhaps a collective approach could be given to help draw out the direction of this type of health care potential savings. I would hate to think that they would be excluded on any type of expertise that they would probably willingly offer to ensure that the government’s bottom...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the Minister’s own words, he said that, for the outfitters, this is not a program for them. So, Mr. Speaker, if he is hearing from the outfitters that this program doesn’t work for them, I am hearing from outfitters myself still even just recently as in a few minutes before session started, in an e-mail that the ink isn’t even dry. The program doesn’t work and is not for them.

Mr. Speaker, the reality is the only person this program works for is the person who does the allocation of these funds who sits in some ivory tower office not understanding what it is really...

Mr. Speaker, the Minister defines it as a shift in the market. I would call it more like a tourniquet. The reality is there are no eco-tourists showing up at the door. The phone isn’t ringing off the hook. It would cost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to decommission these lodges. The outfitters are left holding the bag waiting for this turnaround in the caribou market, if I may define it as that, which is almost impossible. What is the government doing to help either sustain these lodges through this downshift, which is easily predictable in the area of three to five years they...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. For many years the outfitting industry has been significant to our northern economy. It has represented a good balance between tourism and promotion, conservation, economic investment, business and certainly local employment. For decades lodges brought tourists to the North. That was new money to our territorial economy that helped diversify our economy and certainly employ people.

In a market like ours, there was great confidence, and businessmen, women and families alike met that confidence with investment and kept investing in their lodges and in the North.

Now things...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Like a number of my colleagues here, I’ll continue with the municipal airport closure issue. Assuming that does become the eventuality, this is going to cause significant concern.

When I met with the mayor of Edmonton, Mayor Stephen Mandel, he mentioned that Senator Patterson, the senator for Nunavut, had written a letter expressing his concern about this particular issue. However, he did sort of only sprinkle light interest that the territorial government has played a significant role in this, other than the fact that he’s basically mentioned that he knows of their...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To be frank, the Minister shouldn’t be worried about a little whining on this side of the House. The fact is the Minister should be more worried about the fact that they have $23 million outstanding and, he’s got it right, the declining funds should be motivation enough. The fact is if you start implementing a credit bureau process, you start implementing a collection process, what better motivation will it be to go and pay your past due arrears? Mr. Speaker, that’s the issue. Would the Minister immediately enact a policy and stop talking about we’ll think about, we’ll...

Mr. Speaker, I certainly want to stress I hope the Minister doesn’t take this personally, but that is quite a travesty to hear that we are not motivating our tenants by those types of things. I can tell you for a fact, that recently someone had an overpayment and the GNWT, well, the FMB sends the leg breakers. They start phoning them regularly over a simple error. They threatened credit bureau. They threatened everything but the kitchen sink to be thrown at them. But housing arrears accumulate to $23 million. Someone should be given a head shake over there to say, how long are we going to...