Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I would like to talk about working from public departments to municipal governments. Yes, Mr. Speaker, I do agree that community governments have been empowered to make decisions at the community level in regards to municipal service and infrastructure, but most community governments do not have the engineering or technical capacity to take on large-scale projects such as project management, looking at the scope of work that has to be done and ensuring that we’re complying with building codes and also ensuring that we have the capacity to deliver.
More importantly, Mr. Speaker, government departments still take on the responsibility of providing technical services to community governments, regardless if it’s Municipal and Community Affairs through the capital project technical people, land-use planners. Again, Mr. Speaker, I think it’s critical that we, as government, support communities, such as Aklavik, which I talked about the project earlier this week; shoreline erosion.
This government has developed projects in the past. We do have reports on these specific projects and the communities may not have access to that. Again, Mr. Speaker, we have a lot of requirements in regards to accessing federal funds in regards to Building Canada, regarding infrastructure funding. Again it’s who is going to assist the community to ensure that whatever application they put forward meets the required scope of work that’s going to be needed. More importantly, does it comply with the applications that are going to be required by the federal government when they review those applications and ensuring that we’re going to be able to take advantage of those resources and dollars that the federal government is offering, and that we do work with communities through public institutions such as the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs, Department of Public Works and Services, Department of Transportation and other infrastructure departments in this government.
Mr. Speaker, at the appropriate time I will be asking the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs questions on exactly what is this department doing to assist communities dealing with capital projects such as the shoreline erosion project in Aklavik. Mahsi.
Thank you, Mr. Krutko. The honourable Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
