Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This winter the Northwest Territories has received a great amount of promotion and attention as a place to visit for tourism. For the first week of the Olympics, over 70,000 people had the pleasure of visiting Canada’s Northern House, which, as many Members in this House will know, was a joint effort between the Government of the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and the Yukon. This gives people the chance to learn about northern culture, crafts, tourism, and opportunities to travel to the Northwest Territories and Canada’s North.
Mr. Speaker, I had the pleasure of visiting this facility and I’ll tell you it’s certainly a top-notch or first-class presentation of what the North has to offer. Mr. Speaker, over the winter the Globe and Mail had featured colour, full-page photos promoting the Northwest Territories beauty, its romance, and certainly a place to visit for opportunity and adventure. We must make sure that we live up to this promise to people we’re trying to attract.
Tourism comes in many forms, and as I’ve said many times before, one of the forms is recreational vehicles. RV parks can be found just about everywhere across North America and it continues to be a very popular activity even though the fuel prices have certainly gone up, and up. In the quest of bragging rights across this country, RV'ers like to take their creature comforts off the beaten path and I think the Northwest Territories offers that experience that they’re looking for.
Often Yellowknife in the summer will find these large vehicles parked in places not necessarily suited for them. Sometimes you see them at the boat launch, the Rotary Park down by Great Slave Lake, or in rest stops along the highway and picnic sites along the Ingraham Trail. We need to increase our capacity to offer services to these types of tourists, our RV'er community. They are looking for good scenery, shopping, arts and music festivals, museums and other special interests that the North presently offers. So, Mr. Speaker, where are the discussions of the RV park here in the Northwest Territories and certainly just outside of Yellowknife?
There once was a site being picked by the Folk on the Rocks, but for various reasons it didn’t work out. It’s time for ITI to find ways to make sure that we build incentives into the developing RV facilities here in the Northwest Territories and definitely here in Yellowknife.
Mr. Speaker, without this type of opportunity, our small business community has a difficult time meeting the challenges, because tourism dollars are a serious investment into our northern economy. Later today I’ll have questions for the Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment about what we can do to help further support the RV community with parks to meet their needs. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
