My question today is for the Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment. It gets back again to my statement from earlier today, where I talked again about the migrant worker issue here in the Northwest Territories, with the 3,300 migrant workers and the $350 million every year that leaves the Territory.
In my statement I talked about De Beers Canada. I don’t by any means intend to single out De Beers, but it’s a real-life example. They currently have Edmonton as a point of pickup for employees working at their Snap Lake and Gahcho Kué operations. They not only fly them in from Edmonton, but as of January 1, 2008, they’re supplying workers travelling a greater distance than 500 kilometres away from Edmonton $600 a month to get to Edmonton.
This just doesn’t seem right to me, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to ask the Minister if this is in keeping with the spirit and intent of the socio-economic agreement which they signed?
As the Member knows, we have a socio-economic agreement that we negotiated with De Beers. As part of the agreement, there’s an implementation provision that allows, for a certain period of time, for De Beers to provide these employees. Over the longer term, it is our expectation that De Beers and the diamond company as well will hire Northern workers to work in the mines in accordance with the socio-economic agreements that have been negotiated.
I should also point out that in each of the cases, the other diamond companies are also providing — I guess the Member called them migrant workers — out-of-Territory workers from the south and have advised us of that fact. It is our intent to, and we have already, communicate our concern with that.
We will be working with the mining companies to find a way to improve this situation to the benefit of the Northwest Territories.
Mr. Speaker, I’m glad to hear that the Minister is going to be communicating with the mining companies to try to combat this situation that’s playing itself out right now.
Meanwhile, residents in our smaller communities and, as I mentioned, pockets of high unemployment in smaller communities are going without work. I think every opportunity should be afforded to residents here in the Northwest Territories first.
I’d like to ask the Minister: what assistance has this government given to communities like Hay River, Fort Smith, Yellowknife and Inuvik to market themselves to these mining companies and to the migrant workers that are frequenting our Territory?
We are trying to work closely with those communities the Member referred to. As some of you may recall, in an effort to increase the attractiveness of communities like Yellowknife, Hay River, Fort Smith, in the past we have made the Down Payment Assistance Program available, whereby we assisted first-time home buyers to buy houses. That was with the intention of attracting mine workers.
We’ve also been involved with marketing programs. I think we’ve helped the communities put information advertising their communities at the various mine sites.
Mr. Speaker, again I thank the Minister for that. But some of that work was done over ten years ago.
I think what we need is an updated, coordinated approach by the government to the communities that I mentioned earlier, so that they could have a coordinated approach, a package to work with industry, to work with the migrant workers to attract them here to live in the Northwest Territories.
I’d like to ask the Minister if he could commit today to looking at ways and means to work with the community to get this type of package, as I mentioned, and type of marketing campaign off the ground so that we can attract some workers here.
We certainly can commit to do that. Also, I’d like to point out that we’re working very closely with the diamond companies. We think this is a problem for all of us to work together on to try to resolve this situation.
We met with diamond companies in early December. We will continue to work with them. We can also work with the communities to make them more attractive for workers who live in the south to relocate to the Northwest Territories.
Final supplementary, Mr. Ramsay.
Mr. Speaker, yesterday we talked a little bit, too, about setting up community registries where we could identify communities and the individuals in those communities who are looking for opportunities for employment.
I’d like to ask the Minister today to commit to having a look at setting up a registry system in our communities so that we don’t miss a single person who wants to work in the resource sector in our Territory, Mr. Speaker.
I understood that we had a registry at one time. I’d have to go back and check to see whether it’s still in existence. I’ll be working very closely with my colleague the Minister of Education on this.
