Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my statement today was going to be on homelessness but I have decided at the last minute that I'm going to talk about one of our mandate priorities is, you know, in this House when the 19 Members came together, one of the biggest issues that we talked about was contracting and keeping the work in the North, you know. And, you know, we've had lots of talks about this, you know, we've talked about revamping our procurement, our Indigenous procurement policies. So when I look back and thank the Minister for her statement because you know what, I'd really support this wind project, you know, in my community but the one part of it is there's one section of that contract that is only going to be able to benefit the people of my community or the people that live in our region is that access road.
That access road could be built by anybody in our region. We have companies that have built the Tuk Highway. We have the companies that have been working on the highway to the border, you know, but yet we you know, the Minister talks about this project and the Minister is also responsible for the NTPC, the Power Corp, which Entec falls under. This somehow got really swayed in the way we're doing contracts, you know. And so when I, as a community Member, as an advocate for the businesses in my community see that we have outsiders coming in to take the only part of work that our community members could do, they're not gonna build the wind turbine. They don't have those expertise, you know, but they could build that access road. And when we see, when I'm driving and I go to work and I see Whitehorse companies' body jobs sitting in the parking lot and when I see trucking companies coming in from Whitehorse sitting down and, you know, in yards working out on the highway, this is not what we said we were going to do as a government. We said we were going to keep the work local. Whoever we're working with Ministers, Members, we should all be working together to ensure that work stays in the North and not ignoring it.
I will have questions for the Minister of ITI later on. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Inuvik Twin Lakes. Members' statements. Member for Yellowknife North.
