Debates of May 15, 2007 (day 7)

Thank you. Mr. McLeod. Next I have Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The motion here, I am going to not support the motion, as my colleague from Inuvik has moved it, and also Members that want to see a deletion here.

Mr. Chair, I beg to differ from the opinion of my colleague from Kam Lake. There is a lot of activity happening in the Sahtu region. There are about six or seven companies that are very interested just in oil and gas. There are diamond mine explorations that are happening there, so there is…Again, I could talk later on with my colleague here in terms of activity that has happened in the past. I just got off the phone with Husky Energy. They are looking at some activity happening next year in the Sahtu region. We saw what it is like in the region for the impacts. These are just small-scale projects that they are calling 10 or 13 million dollars small ones. For our community, that is very huge and very big. We certainly need their help.

In Inuvik, in 2004, we sent representatives to the Inuvik conference. That was what the conference was asking for, help from our government. Later on, I saw a conference happen in Norman Wells where MACA brought in a bunch of people also to other departments. They were asking for help. We don’t do this. We leave them alone. There is no one there that is going to help our communities. They are going to be on their own. Did we do that down this way here when they had other activities happening? I don’t know. Did we leave them alone to fend off with the diamond mines and other departments for impact benefits? I don’t know. But we certainly listened to the people in my region to see the benefits of these impact advisors coming into our communities and working for us. I saw some of the work that has been done. I saw that it has been good work.

We are there to help the people. I think that is a good investment here of $300,000. It is peanuts compared to what is coming down the pipeline. People’s lives. We just talked about one issue here in the orders of the day. We talked about the impacts of the one issue that we are going to be dealing with. This socio-economic agreement is going to be dealing with our aboriginal governments, with the proponents, Mr. Chair. The benefits to the community far outweigh if we delete this funding here. The benefits, we are going to have more issues to deal with. By adding this in here, the benefits are going to be tremendous for our region.

Mr. Chair, the communities have been asking how do we get involved with the socio-economic agreements. How do we know when to kick our plans in? How do we work with these governments here? Mr. Chair, the timing of the pipeline, well, we could have a best guess as to when the pipeline is going to be built. You know how long it takes to be a journeyman, how many years. It is about four years. You go to school every day, hand in your reports and do the time. It is about four years to do it right on the button. If you drag, sort of take another year or so, these impact advisors can really help us in our communities in terms of preparing ourselves and getting ready to have this socio-economic agreement be honoured by Imperial and the proponents to this agreement. I am thinking here.

Mr. Chair, I think our communities deserve it. As for me, if we don’t do this, we are going to throw them out to the wolves to fend for themselves. Some will do pretty good; some won’t do so good. I am not sure as to why we want to have the deletion of this here. In 2004, the people asked us to help them. Now, in 2007, we are saying no, we are not going to help you anymore. So I want to say that to my Members here to really think this through. I won’t be supporting the motion, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Next I have Mr. Villeneuve.

Mahsi, Mr. Chair. I will probably not even be voting on this motion. I haven’t really decided yet, but I would like to hear everybody’s arguments here. I know they are all good ones and they do all have a lot of weight that we have to consider. What I look at also is basically these are intervener positions and resource development impact advisor positions, pipeline positions, whatever you want to call them, whatever title you want to give them, basically they are all pipeline driven. To me, the pipeline is not anywhere in the near future anymore. It is a couple or three years down the road. We do have a pipeline impact office that is supposed to, and should be I would think, doing all of this kind of resource development impact advisory role for the regions up and down the valley. On the flip side, there is all the federal government funding that has been thrown in the regions up and down the valley to deal with the socio-economic impacts, resource development impacts and everything else that is going to be following with the pipeline. The federal government is doling out lots of money for that with this government included. There is also a lot of money sitting on the sidelines should that pipeline get the go ahead. There is around $500 million that the federal government has sidelined for socio-economic impacts. So all of these things, we put them all in one pot, that is a lot of impact advisory dollars and stuff like that. To me, just throwing an extra $300,000, I know it is not a whole lot of money when you look at the big picture, but I have to agree with some things that Mr. Braden was saying. Your value for money and this one is really hard to swallow. I understand Mr. Yakeleya’s point of view. Sometimes the regions need the assistance and they need the advice of experts in resource development. But on the flip side also, sometimes the regions come out at the end of the day and say, gee whiz, we weren’t given the right advice. We should have done it on our own. We didn’t want it that way. Why is the government making decisions for us? There are always two sides to every argument on this one here.

I like to look at it on a human resource side of things that this government has. We have a lot of human resources out there and so do the communities. I would rather see maybe some of this money going right to the community level and saying, well, you give us an inventory of what you have in the community. I am sure they can pump it out in one day. I am sure a band manager or a community settlement manager can come back to MACA in one day and tell them everything about the community that they have and the people that they have available for resource development or what they should be doing to mitigate the impacts of resource development. That, for me, is a really tough call. I understand MACA’s point of view too, that this has already been developed, researched and looked at. This is the conclusion that they have come to, but, again, it seems like this human resource growth in public service is just steamrolling ahead. It seems like we are getting ahead of ourselves in just hiring and hiring, like Mr. Ramsay said, knee-jerk reactions to needs that I think we should do some reprofiling and reassessing of exactly what those needs might be and how we can use the people at the community level more to address their own concerns as opposed to hiring somebody from wherever to go into communities and tell them what they should do or not do.

With that, I will just be reserving my decision until the vote. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Villeneuve. Next I have Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Every region in the territory is being pressured by resource development. It may not be today; it may not be tomorrow; but they are coming. If they are not coming, they are already here. You have seen the maps of leases that the World Wildlife Fund put out. We also know that the community boundaries are not the extent of what affects communities. The communities are tied to the land and the water. They have been since time immemorial, especially the aboriginal communities.

We know that there is one region that has taken the proactive step to try to come to an agreement with the federal and territorial governments on a land use plan. It has been a protracted negotiation but, at the end of the day, they are going to be the only region that will have a plan that identifies what is for development, what is for communities, what is for resource development and what is protected.

We are slowly, in a fragmented way, setting pieces in place that we can carry that process on into the 16th Assembly in macroeconomic policy. For example, they are supposed to give us a framework to be able to do that. We know that there is more than a pipeline coming down the valley. We met with the green corridor folks last week. They are saying part of the national impetus for this green power grid and corridor is to try to get 3,000 megawatts off the Mackenzie River, which means up by Inuvik. So you tack that on to the proposed pipeline, the timelines are 12 years for the dam on the Slave if they go ahead. So there are things happening. As the Member for the Sahtu said, there are companies in his riding as we speak wanting to explore, get ready for potential pipeline and once Imperial Oil is out of the picture or they fish or cut bait, the pipeline will be built because it is just too valuable a resource not to. The issue of being able to assess cumulative impact which we can’t do as a territorial government, the issue of land use planning, which we have not formally set a path on yet, has to be done. These types of resources give us a leg up to do that. We have to look past this little supp, look down the road to the 16th Assembly and beyond and recognize that we can’t always be playing catch up and we have to try and get ahead of this. Maybe we are not as well organized as we should be, but we have to keep working on that and recognize that we are going to get organized. To do that, we need resources.

I would suggest to you as well, there are areas where we are going to continue to need resources. If we are worried about the size of public service, there are ways to look internally at efficiencies and staff that aren’t really doing the job. I would suggest to you that there are probably 10 to 15 percent of government staff that if deputy ministers were given the thumbs up, they would be able to replace or do without, but we don’t because it is so difficult to get rid of people. So let’s not cut off our nose despite our face because we want to keep the size of the public service down. The only way we are going to do it is to limit our ability to effectively deal with what is coming our way in terms of the resource development, the environmental impacts and the impacts on the basin, all of which we have not been able to determine or quantify. If we don’t do that soon, then we will never do it and we will always be playing catch up.

Mr. Speaker, I would vote and encourage people to try to take a long view here and, yes, there is a zero-based review coming. In the meantime, there are also these other very pressing issues, structural issues, assessment issues, that we have to get ready for. It is going to be a fundamental issue in the next Assembly that we are going to have to deal with these issues. There are some of the pieces in place, but they are not there yet. This is one of the pieces. So I will be supporting this motion. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to add a few comments. Every once in a while we catch this wave of trying to slash or trying to make a point about our public service, somehow sort of creating an image of it being out of control, it is too fat, it should be cut, and look for value for money and such. I guess in a certain context we have to try to be efficient and such, but I don’t know where that really comes from, because I think maybe the suggestion might be we should all get out of this glass building here and go to communities and offices and see what the government workers are doing. For example, when I went to home care service in the bottom floor of the Jan Stirling Building, I had no idea what was going on. They were in a basement in a closet and they were delivering home care services all over Yellowknife. They are packed in a room. We don’t know, my point is, what our workers are doing. It is easy for us to look at a paper and say, well, look at the title. It looks pretty fancy. What are they doing? They don’t need their job and just cut it. For example, when we were in Tuk, we had a little bit of time there and some of us went to visit a child protection worker office there and environmental wildlife office. That is one man and one woman. That is the entire operation for the whole region. It is important to know that there are a lot of duties and work behind the positions that we are creating here.

Going back more specifically to MACA, I don’t condone going to conferences down south unless Members have absolutely everything relevant to do, but I do think it is very useful to go to conferences being organized by MACA. I think, over the last couple of years, especially with the New Deal and many other initiatives being implemented by MACA, MACA has taken on training and capacity building of our communities single-handedly; honestly. If you go to those conferences and sit with the mayors and SAOs and everybody, they will tell you non-stop how much they need to build their community capacity. They have had these meetings every three months or so. Still, that is not enough. NWT Association of Communities is sort of taking on the role of having to train all of the community governments to get ready and to understand what the government is doing and maximizing the opportunities and such. I think we should just be very careful about lumping up the whole notion that the government is too big, fat and inefficient. Of course, there might be some examples of government workers that are not being used to their maximum, but I would point to the leadership in each division and each directorship to make government employees as efficient as possible. I think we have to be careful before we paint with a wide brush and just eliminate positions because somehow we don’t think there is enough work there to do now.

The positions are not allocated. I want to know why there is not one in Yellowknife, because right now you have four positions, in Fort Simpson, Hay River, Inuvik and Norman Wells, and we don’t know where they are going to be located because our briefing information is telling us that MACA is having difficulties finding employees. It is not like this is a sort of make work project and having to dole out jobs because there are more people than jobs to go around. The government has to stay competitive. We have to be a choice employer. We are not the choice employer anymore. There is certainly a lot of work to get the communities ready and community governments ready. That is the same thing for the family violence conference that I was talking about. If you just take time to listen to the community people, they will tell you that they need more community capacity.

I don’t have any other information that would give me evidence to suggest that this is redundant or is repetitive. On that note, I am going to not support this motion. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. The motion is in order. To the motion.

Question.

Just for closing, I would like to recognize Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It was interesting listening to all of the discussion going around the room here. Had I known that the deletion of these two positions was going to bring the pipeline to a halt, the government to a standstill, then I wouldn’t have moved it. What I have been hearing is things won’t happen unless we get these two positions. I don’t agree with that. Two hundred ninety-one thousand dollars can go towards a couple of nurses in the communities. Two hundred ninety-one thousand dollars could go to a dialysis machine in the Beaufort-Delta which is going to need one soon. We have people in our communities. We have community members, community leaders that will protect their people. They don’t need these advisors to do that.

The Minister stated that one of these positions is going to go in Inuvik. I am a Member from Inuvik and I am thinking, well, he is taking a job away from Inuvik. No, I am not taking the job away from Inuvik because there wasn’t a job there to begin with. What I am doing is I am trying to hold this government accountable. I want to hold them accountable for every nickel they spend. Otherwise, I might as well just get a bobblehead doll and sit here and flick his head like that and he could just sit there like that.

---Laughter

I appreciate the comments that went around the table. I know there is a lot of work that needs to be done as far as studying the resource development impact. We have enough advisors out there. We have our own people that are advisors. We have the Inuvialuit, the Gwich’in, the Sahtu, all the way down. They have their own people as advisors. To say that the Inuvialuit, the Gwich’in and that have asked for this money and have asked for these kinds of positions, well, they have also asked for treatment centres. They have also asked for some other legitimate concerns and they don’t get a cheque for $291,000 just like that.

So, Mr. Chair, I appreciate all the comments that went around the table, but the Northwest Territories is not going to come to a standstill because we don’t have these two impact advisor positions. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The motion is in order. To the motion.

Question.

Question has been called. All those in favour? All those opposed? The motion is defeated.

---Defeated

Thank you.

On pages 11 and 12, regional operations, not previously authorized, $19.999 million.

Agreed.

Page 12, sport, recreation and youth, not previously authorized, $250,000.

Agreed.

Municipal and Community Affairs, operations expenditures, total department, not previously authorized, $21.465 million.

Agreed.

Mr. Yakeleya.

Mr. Chair, the one question I have is for the support that is going to help the operating costs for youth centres. I would like to ask the Minister in terms of what type of support that is going to be. How it is going to be dealt with, the 33 communities and some of the communities that have already existing youth centres and some non-government agencies that really got involved and did a lot of good fundraising? Some communities are small in terms of their level of funding, like Colville Lake or Tulita in those regions. I want to ask the Minister, are there different levels, requirements or criteria to access this funding here? Is that something that has already been discussed with the appropriate Minister in terms of how this money is going to be rolled out and when? Is it first-come, first-served? How is it going to be rolled out to the North here?

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Mr. Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, this fund, once approved, will be application-based and communities will be able to apply to a maximum of $30,000 per community. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I move that we extend sitting hours beyond the normal hours of the adjournment to conclude the bill under consideration. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The motion is in order. It is not debatable. All those in favour? All those opposed? The motion is carried.

---Carried

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Do you have a follow-up?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am going to have to apologize to the Minister in terms of his response. Can I ask him to repeat it, because I didn’t have the mic on.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, once approved, this money will be eligible on an application base by communities, to a maximum of $30,000. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The $30,000 per community, up to $30,000, I am not saying that they are going to give every community based on an application, first-come, first-served. It is application-based up to $30,000, so it doesn’t say a community will get $30,000. Is it somewhat within the department to say that the Gwich’in, the Beaufort-Delta, Sahtu, Tlicho, South Slave and the North Slave here will get a certain percentage of the funding? Some communities might be a little slow coming out of the gate in terms of how this application is filled out and sent to the communities in Nahendeh in terms of this funding here. Some of them are pretty quick on the draw in terms of getting this application filled out here. I want to ask the Minister that.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My understanding is all community governments established under our legislation are eligible, as well as First Nation councils. They are Jean Marie River, Kakisa, Hay River Reserve, Lutselk’e Dene Band, Nahanni Butte Dene Band, Wrigley and Detah. The Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs may have further detail on that.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The intention of this program is to support the community operated youth centres. This pot of money would be targeted towards those youth centres on an application basis. With the maximum being $30,000, any one community could apply for it and only one organization within that community. Right now, we are anticipating there are probably around nine youth centres that would be applying. If we have an intake of more than nine, then we would have to decrease the cap of $30,000. That is what we are intending to do. It is really intended to supplement some of the fundraising that the youth centres are currently using and allow them to operate with a little more room to manoeuvre.

Thank you, Minister McLeod. Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, would the new youth centres be eligible to qualify for this funding? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, consideration will be open to all applications, new and existing centres.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I am very happy to see this item in the budget here. I have asked for it. Even if you had communities that apply for it, it would certainly help to offset the…They want to help the communities. They want to offset some of the stuff that is happening in communities because of some communities that don’t have the youth centres open. Even certain amount of time through the months there, that they can have youth centres open, especially on Friday, Saturday and even Sunday nights, that the youth centre would be open to eliminate or to minimize the other stuff that is happening that sometimes has the youth be in trouble or deal with problems. I think that is really good. I think it is a good thing. I am glad to see that this is in the budget and is being looked at. I think the government has heard. I know it is not enough, but I certainly appreciate this being in there. The Minister indicated that there are probably nine youth centres that could be eligible for it and maybe more coming forward. We might have to reduce the…but at least it gives the start for some of the youth centres to get the doors open for them. It is better than nothing. That is what is happening right now. There is money only eligible for certain youth centres in the North and the rest are suffering, so I certainly welcome this. This is good news for me anyhow for the region. I look forward to the criteria. I hope the criteria doesn’t hinder any youth centre organization in the community to not apply for this money. I hope it is a friendly application that people could have access to this and use it in better ways in terms of helping the youth stay away from behaviour that gets them in the newspaper or in one of the RCMP stats. That is all I have to say. That is not so much of a question but more of a comment to the Ministers. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Sport, recreation and youth, not previously authorized, $250,000.

Agreed.

Municipal and Community Affairs, operations expenditures, total department, not previously authorized, $21.465 million.

Agreed.

Page 13, Public Works and Services, operations expenditures, directorate, not previously authorized, $193,000.

Agreed.

Asset management, not previously authorized, $1.334 million. Mr. Braden.

Mr. Chair, one of the initiatives outlined here, it is a new initiative. It is to provide funding for decommissioning and environmental remediation of tank farms in Fort McPherson and Wrigley to the tune of $350,000. I wanted to ask, Mr. Chair, are these funds in any way being secured through the eco-Trust funding or any of these kinds of initiatives from Ottawa, or are they being handled in our regular course of business in managing our tank farms, Mr. Chair?