Joe Handley

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am really disappointed that the Member is so reluctant to move ahead with an important piece of infrastructure here. Clearly, he hasn’t seen the empty store shelves, the shutdown of construction projects because there is no material, the mines to construction industry, everybody being affected by this let alone the number of students who can’t fly home at Christmas. There are no assurances and so on.

Mr. Speaker, when we come to negotiations, we don’t negotiate this in public any more than we negotiate most things that are negotiable in public. We are elected. We...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like the question referred to the Minister of ECE. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It will certainly be the recommendation from the Housing Corporation to, number one, do those intermediate repairs that have to be done to keep the building serviceable for a five-year period, and second is to put forward, as part of the business plan, a request for the money to be able to get on with the planning of a new building. In fact, I expect the Housing Corporation will begin the consultation on the type of facility beginning as early as this year. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Since the Deh Cho Bridge is not on the route to the Sahtu, then I don’t expect it will make a big difference there. But, Mr. Speaker, it will make a difference to those communities on the north side of the Mackenzie River. Now we are doing that much, but, Mr. Speaker, that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to pay attention to the other communities. As the Member knows, we are working on the Bear River Bridge; we have done a lot of work on the Mackenzie Valley highway and put some 20-odd bridges in there already. So we are taking steps to lengthen the season for the winter road to keep down the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is certainly a recommendation we can make to the 16th Assembly, that we work towards some targets. We have done a lot in this Assembly to try to get things moving to lower the cost of living and with some good success. But setting fixed targets may be possible. That’s something we have to work on.

Regarding the Food Mail Program, I have had meetings with the Northern Store and also the co-op on the Food Mail Program to ensure that our communities are benefitting from that program as well. Hopefully, maybe we will lobby the federal government again to put more...

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to recognize a constituent whose family has lived in Weledeh for many years, well-known Bob Bromley.

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Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are currently no programs that I am aware of that would organize a barge order system for communities, but it’s something that possibly our economic development officers or people working for us in the regions could look at. How can we bring some products in on the barges? I know that is being done to some extent already, but there may be ways for improving on that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We don’t have fixed targets that we can work towards, although we do want to work towards the cost of living. It is much too high in a lot of our communities. In the short term, Mr. Speaker, I am pleased with the revisions we are making to the Income Support Program. That is going to help those who are most in need. Mr. Speaker, we have also done some revision on the housing program hopefully to help relieve some pressure there as well.

We have also committed to working with the people in Deline on a mini hydro project which will help to bring down the cost of energy...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to take this opportunity today to report back to this House on last week’s Council of the Federation meeting as well as the meeting with aboriginal leaders I attended along with my fellow Premiers.

In what has become an important part of these meetings, Premiers met with the aboriginal leaders of the five national aboriginal organizations: Chief Phil Fontaine of the Assembly of First Nations, AFN; Patrick Brazeau, leader of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, CAP; Duane Smith, vice-president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, ITK; Bruce Dumount, interim...

Mr. Speaker, there are only so many good things I can tuck under my belt.

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I will certainly endeavour to make this one of them. The original schedule was to have people move into this unit in October of this year. We are working towards that. In fact, Mr. Speaker, I would say we are ahead of schedule on this one, so I am quite proud of it. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.