Bob McLeod

I think it will become very clear as soon as we finish our legal and technical review and we make that draft agreement public. It won’t be for an unlimited period of time. It will probably be a very short period of time, probably a year at the most, I would suspect. We’re still finalizing that part. Sometime before the end of this week you should know the answer.

In a normal situation, when it comes to treaty and Aboriginal rights, we have a duty to consult just like the Government of Canada does. With regard to devolution, we don’t feel that there is a requirement for us to have duty to consult because it’s our position that devolution does not infringe on treaty or Aboriginal rights. We have a significant amount of non-abrogation clauses that ensure we don’t infringe on Aboriginal treaty rights. To make sure that we are very cautious, to make sure we don’t miss anything, we will be doing our consulting with Aboriginal governments and making sure we...

Well, in an ideal world we would educate everybody in the Northwest Territories about the draft Devolution Final Agreement and we would have the comfort of knowing that everybody supports it and everybody would vote here and pass it.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m glad to hear from the Member that she supports devolution. I’m not sure where the conflicting information is coming from because I’ve been very clear in what I’ve been saying.

We have a communications and engagement plan. The plan focuses on engagement with three key audiences, following conclusion of negotiations of the Northwest Territories Land and Resources Devolution Agreement. We will be meeting with stakeholders and communities, Aboriginal governments who are not parties to the agreement, and Aboriginal governments who are parties to the agreement. What we...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I thought my next task was to go out and find all the missing caribou, but I’ll take a detour and talk about 911. I agree that a 911 system would serve residents well in protecting and preserving public safety. As a government, we’ve been focusing on trying to build capacity in smaller communities, and to provide for some emergency and safety services.

I guess the question in my mind is if we do have a framework, if we do hire a call centre in Edmonton and we get a call from a small community calling Edmonton, how do we get a responder in a small centre if we don’t have...

We have already faced those types of situations where we’ve identified positions and we’ve wanted to put them in communities, and due to a lack of infrastructure, lack of housing, lack of office space, we couldn’t find any place to put them. So a lot of times we have to park people in other centres. I think that we expect that, on a number of occasions when we do devolution and transfer positions, we may have to park people in larger centres that have the capacity before we develop additional infrastructure in other centres. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m very pleased this day has come, because now we can answer all the hard questions.

This is something that we’ve planned for. Obviously, I’ve said it many times in this Assembly, that decentralization is a priority for this government. There are already approximately 175 federal government positions that are located in the Northwest Territories, and there will be approximately the same amount of positions that will be transferred to the Northwest Territories. We’ve been working on our organizational design. We expect to have at least four new departments, and we have...

Right now I’m focused on getting the final devolution deal done to have implementation. But I have spoken to a significant number of media and every one of them asks about becoming a province. Obviously, the Northwest Territories is the only jurisdiction in Canada that has a declining population. If we went to become a province, we’re going to have to turn that around. I look at Alberta. When Alberta became a province in the 1930s, they had a population of about 100,000. I expect that with all the potential for development and the tremendous resource potential, the road that we’re going to...

We haven’t worked that out yet. We’d have to talk to the two governments, at least.

I’m a very practical and pragmatic person, so before we start talking about a constitution, we need to get devolution done first.