Mr. Speaker, I’ve stood up in this House a few times to express my concerns about the mines not meeting their socio-economic targets, especially in the area of jobs. But rather than wasting today’s time and certainly the public’s time, I’m hearing Minister Ramsay defend why they continue to have failures in certain areas. Let’s build upon what we know and let’s turn it into a success.
Everybody in the Assembly here knows that mines perform a regular performance reporting and they write out and explain where they have met their key targets and components on the socio-economic agreements and those are between the government and the mines. These reports are publicly available, if you can find them somewhere buried in a website or whatnot, and they do even track trends and certain other items. But let’s use this opportunity not just to talk about trends, let’s build it into a measure that’s meaningful that people can start to understand it. Let’s use these annual reports to publicize clearly, meaningfully in a format that all Northerners, the everyday person can see and understand. We can do business not only better, but we can finally show them we are doing business, which would be an interesting shock.
This government measures, from time to time, culture, community, family, individual well-being, traditional and non-traditional economy. We even look at things such as net effects on government and sustainability. We can do it, so let’s start doing it now.
These are all very important things, but how do we know the mines are living up to their commitment, the ones that they contractually are bound to do that we sort of negotiated, but of course, we have no enforcement tool. Where I’m going with this is maybe it’s time that we start publicizing through a regular occurrence once a year, I say if we put in the newspaper in a simple format with some charts, some graphs and explain mine number A, agreement on employment, they’re meeting these targets, and we can demonstrate that to Northerners.
Quite often a Northerner will come to me and say, you know, the other day my family and I came from Edmonton. We got on that plane and we didn’t know anybody on that plane. Are they all mine workers? Are they hiring any Northerners at all? I think that’s a fair question, because a lot of Northerners think that none of those jobs are going to Northerners who actually live here.
What can we do? It’s time that the government starts publicizing mine commitments in the newspaper once a year, show people through graphs, statistics and black and white facts. Are they meeting them or are they not? Some are doing a great job and some are not.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.
