Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'd like to talk about agriculture. I know it seems odd now there's snow on the ground, but we need to be ready for next spring. In the summer of 2015, the Government of the Northwest Territories underwent community consultations for the development of the NWT Agriculture Strategy. We're now in the fall of 2016, and so I would like to get an update from the Minister of ITI to see where that strategy is, to make sure that it's ready to be implemented for next spring? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We've had the opportunity to bring the Agriculture Strategy to the Standing Committee on Economic Development and Environment, and, based on their review of the document, we are revising the daft presently and putting in their recommendations, and once it's completed the draft will be circulated to other departments and include their internal reviews, and once that's done it's our goal to bring the draft back to committee next month.
Thank you to the Minister. There's been other issues with agriculture in the territory, good issues. Industry is moving quickly. The problem is government needs to catch up. There's been issues with selling domestic meat. We don't have the proper regulations in place. There's regulations in place for the sale of wild harvested meat, but, when it comes to domestic farmraised animals, we're not quite there yet. Is the government doing something to address this so next season in the spring there will be something in place where farmers who wish to have livestock will be able to sell this meat?
During the review of our agriculture strategy, there has definitely been some challenges that were identified in this and one of them was the sale of and safe sale of locally produced meat. We are working on it. We are working with a number of departments, Health and Social Services in particular, to ensure that locally produced food can be sold to the public safely in the Northwest Territories, and I can update the Members now. The Department of Health and Social Services is reviewing its Public Health Act and regulations to address these gaps related to the food inspection, so hopefully by next summer we will be able to sell locally produced meat to the public of the Northwest Territories.
I appreciate that answer, as well. That's good to hear. We have a program, an agreement with the federal government, Growing Forward 2. It matches GNWT contributions 60/40, and it's used to grow the agriculture sector, particularly commercial agriculture. At the current rate of GNWT contributions we're going to miss out on over $1 million of this federal funding. Does the department have a plan to increase its contribution to take full advantage of the federal funds before the fiveyear agreement ends?
The Member is absolutely right. This is a 60/40 plan costshared with the federal government, and the annual contribution last year from the federal government was $732,000 and the GNWT was providing up to $488,000 in this program. The movement of programming dollars to ENR's Take a Kid Harvesting and Take a Kid Trapping programs has negatively impacted ITI's Growing Forward equity funding, so what we've done is ITI is currently checking with other departments such as Health and Social Services and ENR to see if they have any programs that could fall under this funding requirement to help us to build our equity portion for the Growing Forward position. ITI is meeting with the federal government representatives next month to see what additional equity we can be using, and I will gladly get back to the Member on how that works out.
Masi. Oral questions, Member for Yellowknife North.
