Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I listen to my colleagues in this House share the stories of their communities and their regions with respect to the costs of living, and I hear of stories of people who want to leave the North because of the cost of living and people who feel they don’t have options to stay here, I think this government does have a role to play in helping to quantify some of that seemingly anecdotal information. I don’t know if we’ve undertaken an exercise like this lately, but I think the government should look at the different communities. We cannot compare Tuktoyaktuk cost of living to Yellowknife. I know back in the days of EDI, they used to have, for purposes of business development, level I, level II, level III communities. So I think for starters we could compare apples to apples a little more closely if we compared regional centres, if we compared small communities and if we compared Yellowknife as a stand-alone community, because things are quite different here in Yellowknife from a household income point of view and also from a cost of living point of view.
I do think we have a role to play as government, but many things about the cost of living are kind of subjective. Now, you can talk about the price of kilowatt per hour and you can talk about some hard data, but a lot of things are based on personal choices and people’s personal priorities. For example, some people want to drive a new car every few years and some are happy to drive the same car for 10 years. Some people want to buy a new snow machine and harvest their own wildlife on the land. Some people would rather stay home and take that as money and go to the grocery store and buy it.
There are so many subjective aspects to this issue of cost of living. Mr. Miltenberger so aptly pointed out the other day, our government does try to offset those costs, and I think he mentioned a number of $200 million a year in subsidies to try to offset the costs that people incur.
I grew up in south western Ontario in a home with humble means with five children, and my parents always had to pay the Ontario health insurance premium bill when it came every month. That’s unheard of in the Northwest Territories. We don’t pay health insurance up here, and when you get to be 60 it gets even sweeter I’m finding out as my husband is turning 60 next month.
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I’m way far behind.
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I think that the Government of the Northwest Territories should develop some hard data, some good comparisons on the cost of living comparing apples to apples, oranges to oranges, comparing other jurisdictions in Canada and let’s get some hard facts. Then when people say they are leaving because they can’t afford the cost of living, we have some information to come back to them, and we can also look at some initiatives as a government how we can further target some of these costs and help people. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
