Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today will be for the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs and will have to deal regarding the emergency preparedness action plans for communities as well as the National Alert System.
The first question to the Minister is obviously to set the stage here for the questions I have today. It is basically setting a standard in terms of content here. Can the Minister inform this House of how many communities have a current emergency action plan and how many do we have that do not have a plan in place? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The honourable Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Currently we have 21 communities that have community emergency plans. We have four communities that have updated plans. We have four communities that don’t have community emergency plans. Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, thank you to the Minister for this response. Again, out of the 21 communities that do have a plan, some of those plans were not looked at for at least a two-year period, so obviously opportunities. So if you add those 21 with the four, we have a large proportion of our communities out there that require updates to emergency action plans. I think the national leaders or community leaders are making that known.
With that in mind, recently our Community Affairs department and our Minister refused to sign the NWT on the National Alert System that deals with emergency preparedness. Some of the reasoning behind so is the lack of cell phone coverage and some issues of communication or infrastructure which was holding our territory back from doing so. Can the Minister indicate to the Members of the House why he and his department feel not joining the rest of Canada is not a priority for protecting the people of the NWT in the wake of a possible emergency?
Mr. Speaker, I welcome the question because knowing a few of the media reports that were out there said we did not refuse to sign the deal and in no way did we say it is reliant on cell phone service across the Northwest Territories. That got some good play a few years ago, so I thought they played the same card again, but we did say, and I clarified in the second interview, that they did and thankfully they played it, was that we are going to sign on.
We are in discussions right now with the company. We are having some discussions with the providers in the Northwest Territories, so it is our intent to sign on but we wanted to make sure that we did our due diligence first and be able to provide the alert in case something happens, because there is no point in having a public alerting system when you have nothing to alert the public with. Thank you.
Thank you. Again, I do appreciate the honesty of the Minister and by no means is this an issue about cell phone coverage, because obviously there was mention of other infrastructure design. Quite frankly, obviously cell phones could be used, but that as it may, cell phone service or lack thereof, is not really I think the major concern here. Nunavut, for example, has very similar concerns to us. They signed on; they felt that television and radio were the proper tools that they could use in a lack of cell service as well. Because they felt the need to do so, why does the Minister feel that cell phones or mobile services really need to be upgraded in order to sign on?
Thank you. Again, this is not all contingent on cell phone service, but we need to improve our communication across the Northwest Territories and that’s one of the things that I had said. One of the things we discussed in the FPT Ministers meeting in Victoria was the fact that some of the information now they want to send out via Twitter and Facebook and that’s not available to a lot of communities.
Again, I go back to it is our intent to sign on to this. We’re in discussions with the service provider and the providers in the Northwest Territories. So we’re in that process right now and we should hopefully be signed on fairly soon. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Again, I do appreciate the angle we’re going here, and again mention the fact that we’re waiting for communication capability to be as good as the department feels it should be and we’ve got to go through this due diligence process here before joining really the rest of Canada.
Again, we’re the only community or territory or province that has not signed on to the National Alert System. Can we have more specifics from the Minister when he feels and when the department feels that we are ready to sign on board? Thank you.
Thank you. We did provide a letter of support to CRTC to support the application that was going in there. We felt that we should do that because we wanted to look at our capabilities here in the Northwest Territories. So we’ve done that and that was done right away so the application could go in and we need to do our due diligence and not just sign on because everybody else has done it. We wanted to make sure we’re ready. We feel that now we’re in a fairly good position in taking advantage of the technology we do have with the hope that technology across the Northwest Territories will improve in the future so we can use some of the other devices such as the mobile devices that we discussed in Victoria. So the short answer is we wanted to make sure we did our due diligence before we signed on. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The Member for Inuvik Boot Lake, Mr. Moses.
