Bob McLeod

Thank you. I’ll work very closely with my colleague, the Minister of MACA, and we’ll see how well or how many action plans we’ve developed. If our action plans are developed to the extent whereby we can move to the next level and if committee concurs that this would be a priority, then we would seriously look at this framework that the Member is talking about. Thank you.

That would be part of our planning process, and that’s something that we are actively looking at. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

We are a very effective and efficient government, and that is obviously our intention. It doesn’t make much sense to hire people to put them in one community and then make them move to another community. For that reason, we have been undertaking inventories of available housing, office space. Where it makes sense, we will do exactly that, we will hire people to move into certain communities. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I think, in the longer term, we can aspire to that, but right now we’re going to get the devolution deal done and we’re going to implement devolution. We have a good midwife; we can start moving on to provincehood.

We already, as the Northwest Territories, are part of Confederation. I think, if I can put words in the Member’s mouth, he’s talking about becoming a province. We have looked at it. Right now the last time we examined it, our revenues would decline significantly. We would get approximately two-thirds less than what we’re getting now if we became a province, plus we’d have to face a hurdle whereby we would have to obtain at least 50 percent of the five most populated provinces to agree that the Northwest Territories should become a province. Those are the realities that we have to deal with.

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...