Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. Today I talked about the need for this government to look at helping smaller communities with their youth programs. I have questions for the Minister of MACA.
Mr. Speaker, last week I asked the Minister about increasing youth budgets for communities. His response was: if there’s an opportunity to increase funding for youth, that’s something he would look at. My question today is: will the Minister commit to taking action to ensure youth budgets are increased for 2009–2010?
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The honourable Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs, Mr. Robert McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I admire the Member’s perseverance and commitment to an important issue, and it’s an issue that we all share in this House. Having said that, we are identifying more youth funding, and as part of identifying the youth funding, we’re hoping to come forward in the business plan. That should increase some of the funding to a lot of youth organizations.
Mr. Speaker, I also asked about a review of the youth budgets and how they’re allocated to my communities in Tu Nedhe. I got a commitment from the Minister that he will do this.
I would like to follow up today by asking the Minister if he would give me a time frame as to when this review can be completed, keeping in mind that I’m talking about Fort Resolution and Lutselk’e.
Those commitments are coming back to bite me. I did say that we would do a review, and I commit again to the Member that we will do a review. Once we’re done sitting in the House, we’ll have an opportunity to sit down with the department and give them a schedule of when I’d like to see a review done. I will certainly pass that information on to the Member.
Mr. Speaker, I felt one option for getting this government and the communities off on the right foot to start looking at youth issues in the communities is to look at a community based youth strategy specific to this particular community or that particular community of Lutselk’e and Fort Resolution.
I would like to follow up on this by asking the Minister if he will give me a time frame on when he can get started with the community based youth strategy.
Mr. Speaker, for a lot of the community youth strategy MACA will have to have a lot of direct input from the community to work together to come up with a plan for a strategy for the community. I did commit that we would start looking into this. As I said in my previous answer, once we’re done in the House, I’ll have an opportunity to sit down with the department and come up with a schedule of all the commitments I have made and try and see how soon we can come forward with strategies and other information for the Members of this Assembly.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. A final supplementary, Mr. Beaulieu.
Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to thank the Minister for those responses. I also spoke about the Aboriginal Sport Circle and how they deliver programs in many small communities, including Lutselk’e and Fort Resolution. I’d like to ask the Minister if he could commit to increasing the Aboriginal Sport Circle budget to be in line with other territorial sporting organizations.
Mr. Speaker, the budget for the Aboriginal Sport Circle…. I mean, if we’re looking at increasing budgets, particularly for youth groups, I’m sure that would be taken into consideration. That would come up during our review. Any increase would come up during the review of the business plans, which we’ll be undertaking in a couple of weeks.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
