Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to talk today a little bit on one of my favourite topics: decentralization.
We’ve been talking about this a lot and I’d like to thank the Premier and Minister Ramsay, who recently took the time to meet with a delegation from Hay River, including MLA Bouchard, myself, the then-acting mayor and representative from the Chamber of Commerce, and the town SAO who came up to Yellowknife and discussed several issues, but one of them, and one of the very important ones, of course, was decentralization.
I don’t need to tell people I’ve been around this place a long time, and although this has been the cry of Members from outside of Yellowknife for many years, I am very pleased to report that we are starting to see some sincere and concrete commitment and movement on the part of this Cabinet to realize some decentralization of some of the programs, services, positions and activities that normally would occur in the capital to the other regions.
I can’t go into detail at this time, of course, because some of these things haven’t been announced yet, but I think I can safely say there’s been some groundwork done in terms of determining the capacity that communities outside of Yellowknife have to accommodate workers. They’ve looked at office space, they’ve looked at housing, they‘ve looked at space in schools. This government has begun to look at those things and we are expecting to see some early results from some of that work that’s been done.
You know, decentralization isn’t just about government jobs and government departments. It’s the mindset of the government, that when they’re planning anything, that they think of how we can benefit and fairly distribute those activities outside of the capital, even things like holding meetings. There are a lot of meetings that go on that are undertaken by government departments. I mean, even that is decentralization, if smaller gatherings can be sent out to be held in the communities.
I’d like to thank Minister Abernethy for choosing Hay River as the location of the first gathering of the anti-poverty roundtable, and they came down to Hay River and subsequently met in Inuvik. These are the concrete kinds of things that I think this government can do to demonstrate that they do care about sustainable, vibrant communities outside of the capital. Thank you.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.
