Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I want to stand up in this House again, sadly, to say that I have to repeat my statement again about the plight of an industry in Hay River that has been open and operating there since 1969, but this government, through their action and inaction, is going to allow it to fold. That is Patterson Sawmill. We are sitting in the Northwest Territories in a virtual forest; we are in the boreal forest. I don’t know how many ENR employees we have who look after forest management and yet we cannot eke out one single sustainable industry and support that logging industry to continue here in the Northwest Territories.
Mr. Speaker, let’s be clear. It’s over unpaid stumpage fees. It’s over a debt owed by Pattersons to this government of less than $120,000. Now, surely we can muster the political will to somehow recognize that this has been a company that has existed in Hay River that employs people. We as a government can expend millions of dollars on pilot projects and in testing things and let’s experiment and let’s see if this will get off the ground, and here we are, we have a company that employs six people, it’s a family business and they have been prohibited and stopped from going to work this winter to harvest logs in an assessed area because they owe this government less than $120,000. I think it’s shameful. There is no one else who has carried on a business harvesting our renewable resource of timber in this territory except for them.
How many debts have we written off as a government to businesses that were kind of sketchy to start with? Here is the catch-22 that the Patterson Sawmill is in: If they can’t get their permit to go work, they can’t pay their debt; but if they can’t pay their debt, they can’t go to work. That’s where they are stuck right now, in limbo, and I am very unhappy, disappointed with this government that we cannot find a way to let this company get back to work. They’re not asking to forgive the money. They’re asking them to let them go to work so that they can pay back the stumpage fees. If a forest fire burns the whole place down, we go out and replant the trees, but somebody goes out and tries to create a little economy and a little industry by cutting down the trees and they can’t immediately pay the stumpage fees because of some difficult economic times and we’re going to shut ‘em down and we’re going to crucify them. Thank you.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The Member for Deh Cho, Mr. Nadli.
