Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Before I begin, I want to thank the good folks at the NWT Bureau of Stats. They’re a very important pillar of our government because they provide very important information each and every day to folks like me so I can do my job.
Because of that very important information, I can see that 35 people left the NWT last year when I compare the final quarter of 2013 against 2014. That really comes down to one person in the Northwest Territories left every 10 days. That’s a net loss. We’re losing transfer payments. That’s an additional $25,000 per person walking out of the Northwest Territories every 10 days. That potential also means we’ve lost tax filers in the North, we’ve lost community vitality. Every community is not immune from that suffering of people leaving.
The question is, why are they leaving? Well, you don’t have to look too far to the announcement the other day that the NWT Power Corp once again said another increase is on its way. The continued tsunami of increases weighs very heavily on the everyday family trying to get by.
Now, I know the government dreams, it may dream big some days when they say they want to attract 2,000 people to the Northwest Territories, but let’s be clear, I don’t know how they’re going to come when we pay some of the highest costs across Canada.
No, I don’t blame the good folks at the NWT Power Corp. I know many of those people and I know many of them do their job very well every day. They try as hard as they can to ensure that our system is accountable and reliable. To that, they certainly deserve and get my respect. That is not the issue. It comes down to the government’s mismanagement of this particular problem. The government has to start to realize that it can’t just let this essential service, as described by the Minister of Finance, become such a cost it’s too prohibitive to live here. There’s not a day goes by that somebody starts to tell me or sends me an e-mail or bumps into me at the Co-op or the other grocery store and says, “You know what? I can’t afford to live here anymore.”
We must make choices. So when Northerners pay two, three, four times or more on our power bills, how is the everyday family going to get by because our salaries are not two, three and four times they are in equal and comparable jurisdictions.
I’m going to end by saying it’s time this government become the master of its own destiny with some social engineering that helps Northerners live in their own homes. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
