Debates of October 25, 2006 (day 15)

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, if you follow some rough math in the two and a half minutes that I have and each of us has to stand here and make a statement today, $1,250 will have flown out of the Northwest Territories in resource royalties and taxes. That’s $1,250 in two and a half minutes. That’s three- quarters of a million dollars a day, Mr. Speaker, because we have not yet been able to get ourselves together and present that unified voice, that unified bargaining strength with Ottawa among all the northern leaders to ensure that our part of Canada has the share of wealth of this country that most other parts of Canada already have.

Mr. Speaker, it’s a dilemma. We don’t have a hammer. We don’t have aces up our sleeves. We are a territory under the Constitution and the laws of Canada, but what we are really lacking, Mr. Speaker, after decades now of trying to establish ourselves as a legitimate partner in the development and the management and the benefits of all the resources up here, we have lacked the will on the part of the federal government to really make this happen. We are hobbled, as some of my colleagues have already talked about today, by a lack of unity among our collective leadership and that really should be where we should be going. We do, Mr. Speaker, have the moral and the political, even the legal right, to demand this, but we’ve got to present that strong, unified force.

We’ve got to set some terms because at the rate at which the wealth is leaving this territory and the expansion of those resources and that wealth, Mr. Speaker, we have a lot to lose. So now is the time when we really have to apply ourselves, Mr. Speaker.

---Applause