Norman Yakeleya

So the Minister is going to table a document on March the 1st and then this triggers a process where there’s going to be public discussion now in the Northwest Territories as to the establishment of an NWT Heritage Fund. Is it six months of discussion with the public or is it going to be something like the other discussion papers we’ve had regarding utility companies? So I guess I wanted to see as to when does the Minister see this discussion on the establishment of the Heritage Fund being concluded or to move to another phase?

I’m good for that page.

Can I just get a brief on the other, on 1-13, $574,000?

This requires agreement in this House to increase the funding. I am not too sure if we even have an appetite for this by the Members. Of course, we have to find funding elsewhere and it’s got to go through a whole process here to seek an increase for funding. I am not sure if there’s an appetite, like I said, to increase the Metis funding for the locals here in terms of their operation. It is a good gesture by this government. No doubt about it. You know, for the Metis people for $13,235. You know how much it costs now to operate an office? Even ourselves as MLAs, we get budgets here to...

No, thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, my comments are going to be specific to the comments I heard from the Minister. Through the discussion of details, I will ask the Minister about some things I’d like to know in detail.

Regarding political development in the Northwest Territories, we have some issues that are pretty sensitive right now to the aboriginal governments in the North here. Here, we try to build a common front for political development to look at some bigger issues on the table regarding resource revenue sharing, devolution, the common vision for people in the Northwest Territories...

No, thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I just wanted to ask some questions to the Minister of youth. Over the weekend I had the pleasure of watching the hand games. At the hand games they had a lot of youth that were involved in the tournament. I want to ask the Minister of Youth on the involvement of youth more into the hand games, if there is some type of avenue that the communities can take to involve the youth almost on more of a territorial level youth hand games tournament with his staff working with the different organizations in the Sahtu communities.

Mr. Chair, I wanted to ask about probably a brief strategy in terms of devolution negotiations and the participation of the aboriginal organizations. I know there’s got to be a point where you have to agree to the process and I wanted to ask the Premier who is on board and who is not on board as a government going forward to sit with the federal government to look at this big ticket item. It’s a good start, but we’ve got to get going. So we’ve got to sort of get things on the go here and I guess I’m listening for a starting point on where we go from here.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Ramsay asked the question for me.