Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I want to talk about our population in the Northwest Territories. As we all know, as the population continues to decline it puts downward pressure on all of our industries and downward pressure means higher cost of living.
When I look around the Northwest Territories, I see almost every one of our communities losing people. It’s better described in such a painful way as our communities are bleeding their population, which is the lifeblood of those communities. People enrich the lives of everyone in all these communities, both large and small. Not just economically, the jobs are very important, make no mistake, but the social vitality of new families and growth of the communities goes a long way, it keeps those communities alive. Like I say, the growing population in a community is the lifeblood of those communities.
I was looking at some of the statistics recently and I ran across the past 10 years. I saw the Beau-Del population shrink, I saw the Sahtu barely hold on to its population for the last 10 years by the skin of its teeth, I’ve seen the Sahtu’s population shrink and the Tlicho and the YK region barely grew marginally. Sadly, this is not positive news.
We need population growth in all of our territory in every corner of every community because that helps the whole territory. Yes, I am a Yellowknife MLA and I do welcome population growth here, but I also recognize how critical it is to the growth of every community that needs these people, these jobs, this vitality, this lifeblood.
I heard the budget address the other day by our Finance Minister. Only historians will be able to judge whether that was a great blueprint of excellence or was it a piece of art that will be shelved in the creative writing section next to the Brothers Grimm? We don’t know.
With his optimism of saying 2,000 people will be coming in two years last year, and now four this year, are we just adjusting the time schedule to finally meet the stats? Mr. Speaker, that reminds me of the rendition of when I played games with my kids and then they loose and they go, can we do it best out of three now, best out of five next, and we keep going. Is that how the government is measuring its statistics on its growth, by just continuing to move the time frame to say, well, we’ll meet that 2,000 growth population one day, some day?
The announcement the other day sounded really exciting, but we still need a blueprint to show where we’re going to gain traction. As I’ve said at the start, people are the lifeblood of our whole territory, and that’s critical that every community grows. We need to see a plan. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Item 4, reports of standing and special committees. Mr. Nadli.
