Thank you, Madam Speaker. The City of Yellowknife is under a lot of pressure and has increasing demands for more residential lots and subdivisions in the city of Yellowknife. The residential areas are needed to add to the city’s quality of life, allowing the city’s increasing economic growth and to accommodate the city’s future workforce, the workforce that we are desperately trying to attract with initiatives done by this government. However, there is a very low supply of available residential lots and subdivisions at a reasonable cost to develop within this city.

Recently, the City of Yellowknife developed a residential study prepared to evaluate the feasibility of in-field development opportunities on 15 sites within the urban area of Yellowknife and some of these sites are nature preserves and parks and recreation areas. Some of these sites and green spaces which are now slotted for development are, for example, the Taylor Road area, possibly even the community gardens area and maybe even behind the Avens area. These could disappear in our city forever because there’s a lack of available land and affordable land to be developed in a reasonable way.

Madam Speaker, the hallmark of any capital city or any city in Canada, for a fact, is the abundant amount of green space in that city. Look to the river valley of Edmonton and the park systems of Ottawa and you’ll know exactly what I mean. Not to mention about what the abundant green space does for the quality of life, as well as the community atmosphere in that particular area.

I don’t want the city to unnecessarily feed on itself because they have no support for future residential subdivision development and I don’t want to see the Yellowknives Dene not being given their right to ascertain lands that belong to them. But, Madam Speaker, we have a role here to play and it needs to be played by our Premier, a Premier I would like to see work with the City of Yellowknife and the Yellowknives Dene to work out opportunities so everyone can be happy to get what they need and definitely deserve. I think there’s an opportunity here so we don’t have to go back and eat up our valuable green spaces, our parks and recreation areas or even our nature preserves so people don’t have to fight over those areas just to build houses.

Madam Speaker, an affordability role needs to be played and I think our Premier can work as a great mediator to help solve some of these problems we have here in the city of Yellowknife. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

---Applause