Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, imagine waking up every day in a house that’s run down, mouldy, drafty and too small for your family. Then one day, you wake up in a big, new, beautiful home. You get out of bed and brush your teeth in your en-suite bathroom and then make breakfast in your spacious kitchen. Mr. Speaker, you head off to your job with the mine, with a six-figure salary that helped you pay for your new home.
It’s well known that we have a deficit of appropriate housing in our territory. It’s been discussed ad nauseam, but no matter how many homes we’ve built, unless we address the cause of the economic disadvantage that fuels the need for subsidized housing, the problem will only get worse. I’m not at all opposed to social housing. We need to support those who need it. But when there are healthy men and women in Whati who want to work, who want to earn a good income, and who want to provide for their families, then it’s my priority to give them an opportunity to do that. The road to Whati is not a handout to a mining company. It’s a way to support the creation of well-paying mining jobs and bring money and opportunity into a community. Despite how it’s sometimes portrayed in this House, Road to Resources is not a pejorative term. Roads to resources are our best hope to turn our local and territorial economies around. Just think if we built the Slave Geological Province road when it was first discussed in the '50s or if we built it in the '60s or the '70s or at all. We wouldn’t have a $3.2 billion infrastructure deficit and a housing crisis and we wouldn’t be sucking at the teat of the federal government, begging our residents to complete the census so we can get our headcount money. We would have a stable resource revenue stream, securing our people’s future for generations to come. I didn’t get into politics to put Band-Aids on our problems. I did it to get people working. I don’t want to be part of another Assembly who couldn’t do what was needed to provide for our territory, so let’s build these roads and put people to work so they have the power to buy their own homes. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Members’ statements. Member for Nunakput.
