Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I have a few questions for the Minister responsible for MACA as follow-up to my Member's statement. Although MACA did not play a lead role in creating our cannabis legislation, the department's role in working with communities is going to be critical if we want the NWT to respond successfully to legislation. I would like to ask the Minister: what is the department doing to support community governments as they navigate this changing legal landscape? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we are part of the interdepartmental committee overseeing the implementation of cannabis legislation here in the Northwest Territories. One thing that we are doing, though, is looking at having a conference and bringing in people from each of the communities to attend the conference and looking at addressing any community governance concerns, hamlets, communities, bands. I will be looking at striving to support the community governments and their understanding of this legislation or any concerns that they might have.
Now, we are looking at having this conference sooner than later because the legislation just came through. We were looking at having it in November. However, with the tourism and a lot of conferences going on, it was hard to get that conference up and running, so we are looking at January to have that conference. So all hamlets, all community governments can get ready to look at coming in.
Some of the things that we are going to be looking at are business licences, looking at plan review, fire safety is going to be a big one now that it has become legalized; community planning, zoning bylaws are some other things that we need to look at. So all of those are going to be encapsulated in the conference that we are going to hold.
I appreciate the Member's question, and it is something that we are looking at. As I mentioned, we are part of this interdepartmental committee and we are going to try to address it and make sure that we have a good transparency approach to working with our community governments.
We have some time here, as we are not doing the O and M right now, but in my Member's statement I talked about the need for more resources for enforcement in our small communities. Can the Minister commit to reviewing the funding his department provides to small communities for enforcement purposes and to increase it where needed to tackle cannabis legislation?
As this legislation just came through, I know there was concern about funding for all communities across the Northwest Territories. As the Member knows, we just recently did have an election and we are going to be reaching out to the new mayors, the new councils, the new NWTAC, if there's going to be an NWTAC board, and have these kinds of discussions with them. We knew this legislation was going to be coming in. We had discussions and concerns brought up at our last meeting, when Cabinet did meet with the NWTAC. We will continue work with the local government administration, as well, and make sure that, as this legislation unfolds, we will be there to adapt and revise any types of work that we need to.
Right now, funding enforcements, we don't know what they are going to be. We are going to have to work with the Department of Justice as well as other departments to make sure that we can adjust to how this legislation proceeds. So it's early days and we will be working with this interdepartmental committee to make the necessary changes. Like I said, working with the partners, the NWTAC and LGANT.
MACA's School of Community Government does very important work in our small communities. Can the Minister commit to developing training materials for delivery through the school on cannabis-related municipal planning and enforcement from the community's perspective?
Yes, that is a very good idea. With my other hat, the Housing Corporation, we are looking at developing some signage and communication to get out to all our public housing units. I know the Department of Health and Social Services is working on some really good education and awareness information. So we will work with our committee to see what we can develop, and we do have some really good training opportunities, where we can go online and do some kind of, like, eLearning workshops with our regional centres, so that is a very interesting concept. We will make sure that our interdepartmental committee takes that into consideration when we are getting this information out to our regions and out to the communities.
Oral questions. Member for Yellowknife Centre.
