Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Premier today, and I’m just wondering if the Premier was able to get word out to the Dene chiefs and Aboriginal leaders across the Northwest Territories about the Prime Minister’s visit this morning and the opportunity for them to attend. Mahsi.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The honourable Premier, Mr. Roland.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I believe that the communications team, both from the federal government and from our side, we weren’t aware of a list of invites and so on, but we were able to get the news and the invites out, I believe it was late yesterday. Thank you.
Thank you. I appreciate that information and I’ll pass that along to my constituents who are interested. I guess, following up on the Prime Minister’s visit, is there anything the Premier can report back to us on the discussions? I realize his visit was very short this morning, but I wonder if the Premier had an opportunity to visit and whether we might hear what we should be hearing about. Thank you.
Thank you. The meeting was short. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to have a one-on-one with the Prime Minister, but the three Premiers from the territories did have a meeting with the Prime Minister and we laid out a number of pan-territorial issues; housing, for example, as well as infrastructure.
I raised with Minister Aglukkaq the issue that was raised in the House here the other day around the Green Fund initiatives and our support for the city’s application.
Also, I had a chance to discuss where the pipeline initiative may be sitting and I expected the answer I got, that it’s in the proponent’s hands to make a decision on that, and talked about, for example, fibre optics is one of those avenues we could be looking at here in the Northwest Territories through support.
The Prime Minister asked me about this government’s move on the Inuvik-Tuk road, if we’ve met our side of the equation, and at that point raised that as our departments are getting together, they need to work out the actual arrangements and figure out this 75/25 percent share arrangement and what that would all incorporate. So there were those things that we were able to touch on.
Of course, with other Premiers there, they were bringing up their issues from their constituencies as well.
So I had a quick opportunity to raise some of those areas going forward. One of those things that we discussed was this continuation of the THSSI program and the fact that now we’re on the same page as all the other jurisdictions across Canada when it comes to the accord, Canada Health Accord. The Prime Minister at that point said we will need to get together as a country and really look at our ability to deliver a sustainable program, and I know that will be the challenge for the next governments as they prepare to deal with that accord. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Roland. Final supplementary, Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I very much appreciate all that information. It’s very good to get that out. It sounds like a lot of subjects were covered in a very short period of time, and I’m sure there was strong commonality amongst our Premiers.
I’m wondering, just following up on the discussions we had yesterday and the day before, I know the water monitoring stations are being shut down across the North, both transboundary and 21 out of 23 in the Northwest Territories, completely devastating our Water Quality Monitoring Program. Did the Premier have a chance to raise that with the Prime Minister? Mahsi.
Thank you. I did have an opportunity to talk about devolution and the impacts of some of the decisions being made would have on a final package that we would look specifically on the water station, the monitoring issue. I did raise that with Minister Duncan as he was a part of the meeting on that scenario. Although it’s not in his shop specifically, it does affect the overall deal we’re talking about when it comes to the environment and the agreement-in-principle and just how that work needs to be done in honouring the commitment we had on paper, at least, I see through the agreement-in-principle. He’s taken that information. I was hoping to have another side discussion with the Prime Minister but, unfortunately, the time ran out and I wasn’t able to connect directly on that subject.
Thank you, Mr. Roland. The honourable Member for Great Slave, Mr. Abernethy.
