Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Small business accounts for a large proportion of employment in both Canada and the North, but it could do much more for northerners. Mr. Speaker, we seem to focus on mega development by a few of the world’s largest corporations. The result is a raging but precarious economy that causes us to import workers from afar while local businesses suffer. The main benefit of money is pipelined to the South and local dollar gains are not embedded within a healthy society.

Small businesses provide a venue for self-sufficiency and self-reliance and ways for owners and operators to contribute to their family and community. They engage people in our society.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business reports that the biggest challenges are finding new customers in markets, dealing with paperwork and government regulation. In the North, adult literacy and, recently, availability of workers pose additional challenges. To develop small business, the GNWT needs to invest in research and pilot projects to continue building our adult Literacy Program and to provide relevant and effective training.

A focus on small businesses that deal with local and regional needs, such as food production and distribution, safe drinking water, tourism, energy efficiency and renewable energy and the arts, provides many benefits, including the strengthening of local communities. Value-added products, the manufacture or refining of products from raw materials, increase these benefits. Buckley’s is a good example in the Weledeh riding. They harvest fish in Great Slave Lake and sell to local Yellowknife markets, including restaurants such as Bullock’s Bistro, that advertise and benefit from access to fresh local fish.

We need focus on businesses that use and develop local expertise, that use renewable resources with value added, and that contribute to self-sufficiency. We need continued support for the project to produce heat from Yellowknife’s abandoned gold mines and to expand that to other locations, and we need support for local purchase and provision of goods and services, including reduced taxes on NWT businesses and artists that help meet our basic needs of food and materials with local resources.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, we need to seek and involve the expertise of others from similar environments and societies, such as the Scandinavians, to leapfrog forward into progressive beneficial developments with proven technologies and approaches. I look forward to working with the government on this priority. Thank you.

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