Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Capacity building in the Northwest Territories is more than bricks and mortar. Mr. Speaker, the whole idea of building capacity is building the most fundamental resource we have: our people.
Mr. Speaker, in a lot of our small, rural, remote communities, we are struggling to basically see the benefits of these developments, regardless if it is government contracts and services, building of houses and homes, and like the Minister of Transportation mentioned, improvement to the community access programs. Mr. Speaker, all of these programs are needed to build capacity.
Mr. Speaker, The fundamental building block of any community is its human resources and making sure that we have the human resource capacity to take on programs and services delivery and ensure the wealth remains in our communities and provides people with jobs to sustain their independence from government programs and services, and to be able to take advantage of homeownership programs and access programs to be able to get government services and build capacity for our younger students, who we have all seen an all-time increase in graduation rates in our communities. It’s one thing to graduate students, it’s also important for ourselves to ensure that through that graduation and education process we find jobs that are sustainable, meaningful and we retain those young people in our communities.
I think it’s critical as a government that we take a close look at our statistics and where we have high pockets of unemployment and high pockets of social dependency through social programs and services, whether it’s income support, and the safe, viable communities that we all talk about, are we realistically meeting that objection knowing that we have some communities well in excess of 40 percent unemployment yet other communities have less than 10 percent?
We have to look at the government’s investments in the Northwest Territories and make sure they really are achieving the goals and objectives that we set to have an economically diverse and trained workforce in the Northwest Territories. That means 33 communities in the Northwest Territories have to meet that objection and we, as government, have to do a better job to ensure that’s happening.
Thank you, Mr. Krutko. The honourable Member for Great Slave, Mr. Abernethy.
