Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s interesting that I’m going on the heels of such a happy report from the Minister of ITI, because today it’s Monday. I don’t know if I’m in a Monday mood or what, but I want to talk about Hay River. Hay River, Hay River, the Hub of the North.
My question to this government is: Who cares about Hay River, the second largest community in the Northwest Territories? People say things like, I like Hay River, I like coming to Hay River, but that’s not going to cut it. That’s not going to be good enough. They say Hay River is resilient, they’ll figure it out. I’m tired of being the happy, optimistic champions of all things economic and all things entrepreneurial.
Hay River needs some help. The absolute success of Hay River over the years has been its diversified economy and was made up of things like tourism, manufacturing, agriculture, the commercial fishery, the transportation hub, the railhead of the North. But, Mr. Speaker, lots of these things are being left to languish right now.
You know, it seems that we can spend – I don’t know; I don’t want to say the number, I don’t know how big it is – you know, to go off, well, let’s just say hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to China and Japan to get more tourists for the Northwest Territories. But those tens of thousands of tourists are coming to Yellowknife. I mean, let’s call a spade a spade. They’re not coming anywhere else.
Where was this government when the Greyhound bus service, which is a national bus service, cut off its bus service to Hay River? Oh, that was only 25 little tourists getting off the bus every week in Hay River. Oh, but we don’t care about them. But we sure care about those tens of thousands that are coming to Yellowknife. But anyway, where was our government? The Yukon government effectively lobbied Greyhound, and guess what? The Greyhound bus still goes to Whitehorse today.
In the manufacturing sector, Hay River is innovative. They put their money where their mouth is. They put their money on the table when it comes to manufacturing. But we shouldn’t, as MLAs, have to intercept contracts going out to southern companies for something that can be manufactured in Hay River. We shouldn’t have to have a political intervention every time somebody in the manufacturing sector draws that to our attention. There should be a mindset in the government, like, hey, this can be done in the North, let’s figure it out.
Agriculture, the Minister spoke to that here today, and we are seeing some. But I give a lot of the credit to the federal government and to people like Jackie Milne. Sorry, our government has been saying they’re going to have an Agriculture Policy. They’ve been saying that for the last 20 years. It’s coming. So is Christmas. We haven’t got it yet.
Mr. Speaker, I guess I made a too long list of things to complain about today because I haven’t even made it through half of them, but that’s the end of my time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
