Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Nov. 19th, 2009

[Mary Lou Cherwaty]

No, I would need to do that to get the other statistics you're asking for. The numbers I came up with are through the Government of the Northwest Territories Bureau of Statistics. The Nunavut numbers in the brief come from the Nunavut Bureau of Statistics.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Todd Russell]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Duncan, I gave you an additional 30 seconds. I hope you're happy with that.

[John Duncan, Conservative, Vancouver Island North, BC]

It's because you like me so much.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Todd Russell]

We'll leave that for debate.

We'll go to Mr. Bevington for the last five minutes.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

I'll go to Mr. Atamanenko first, because I sit right in front of his uncle in Parliament.

The arts council gets $500,000 from the territorial government. Is there any other funding available for artists in the Northwest Territories?

[Boris Atamanenko]

Yes, there is, Dennis.

We have a support to northern performers program, which currently rides at $186,000. That supports about 20 of our festivals and other public performing events in communities in all regions of the territories.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

That's more for events funding.

[Boris Atamanenko]

That's events funding, and it is designed to put northern performers on northern stages. It is not for bringing in a southern act to perform on a northern stage.

Shall I continue with the litany of programs?

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Yes.

[Boris Atamanenko]

The other programs are core funding support to cultural organizations. Three are aboriginal organizations. These are assigned based on the demographics. There is a Gwich'in Social and Cultural Institute, a NWT Métis Cultural Institute, and a Dene Cultural Institute, which is known as the Yamózha Kúé Society and is based in the South Slave. It represents the broader spectrum of Dene people and languages. There is also the Northern Arts and Cultural Centre. Specifically for the arts, that is the one performing venue we're able to support through core funding. Those are not administered by the Arts Council, specifically.

This year we introduced three new programs. One is for supporting youth in theatre specifically, and that's a $50,000 program. Another program was designed to target the media and film arts. That's another $50,000 program. One more was for literary arts support. These are all designed for organizations in those fields to be delivering services, training, and workshops to advance those disciplines.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

In the Yukon they're putting money from CanNor into the arts and are giving it directly to individuals who are engaged in artistic production, and in many cases they are building careers for themselves. I'm thinking that maybe something that could be suggested as part of moving forward with this study is the importance of small investments in the arts and seeing whether we can perhaps get that to the federal government through our study bringing that out. That's the purpose here, I think.

In a larger province like Alberta, do you have any idea what the per capita investment in the arts would be?

[Boris Atamanenko]

I have a table, which I don't have with me now. I would be wrong to try to wing it with the figure, Dennis. But I could provide it to the panel by email. It compares per capita funding for all regions in Canada--all provinces and territories--for arts. That could be useful.

I'm not sure about the numbers, but I think right now the Northwest Territories sits next to the Yukon as one of the highest, but our populations are smaller as well.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Ms. Cherwaty, the number I saw for the United States during this recession, using the same figures you have, is about 22%. I think your figure is probably pretty accurate in what it says. But how much of it is due to circumstance, such as a lack of child care or the lack of opportunity to get to work because the network is not in place that can give you the support to get to work? How much of it is gender-based?

[Mary Lou Cherwaty]

I think that's part of the problem. When we look at statistics, they're very basic and they don't cover all those things, and unfortunately, to my knowledge, there hasn't been a lot of research done on that. I know that child care is probably one of the largest barriers to women, especially when entering the workforce. There are few organizations here related to mine training that look specifically at women in trades, especially women in mining, oil and gas, and the barriers they have.

Aside from mining, the other barriers are the lack of child care. I can't emphasize that enough. We've had day care closures here in Yellowknife, Fort Smith. There's no access to quality affordable child care.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Todd Russell]

Thank you, Mr. Bevington. That's your time, sir. Thank you very much.

Thank you all.

Mr. Lévesque has been quite persistent. He wants his two minutes.

[Yvon Lévesque, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

One minute is enough. This is for Mr. Pokiak.

Mr. Pokiak, you talked about overcrowded housing conditions in your presentation. Roughly how many more housing units would you say your communities need? This is my last question, but I believe it's a very important one.

[Charles Pokiak]

Our community would like to see at least 20 more houses. As I said before, we have had these houses for over 30 years, and every five years, ten years, we renovate them. Just get rid of the old ones and build duplexes or something in the same place, because the lots there are pretty big and you could have two houses rather than just one. And with a duplex, two or three bedrooms, that would solve the problem.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Todd Russell]

We're going to have to end it there. Yes, there were a couple of questions about statistics, and Ms. Cherwaty has offered us some explanations, which we certainly appreciated.

For the information of our panellists and for the committee, our researcher was doing some research as well and came up with a Canada-wide statistic for the “not in labour force”, which I think is the way you explained it in your figure, and it's exactly the same, 33% in Canada, the same as the stat that was provided for the Northwest Territories.

On behalf of all our committee members, I want to thank our witnesses here tonight who have taken their time to share with us and to greatly inform our study of northern economic development. As I said earlier, you have brought unique perspectives and voices that aren't always invited to these types of forums because of a restricted sense of what economic development is. I think the committee has rightly expanded its view of the dynamics around economic development and what it means in a more holistic fashion.

I commend our committee members for that, and I commend you for being here. And to those who have travelled quite a distance to be with us, a special thank you for being here.

With that, we'll suspend for ten minutes to change panels. Have a good night.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Good evening. I was going to say “ladies and gentlemen”, but it looks like it's all gentlemen at this point.

Bonsoir, mesdames et messieurs. As was pointed out by my parliamentary intern, there are other ladies in the room. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's been too long of a day. One tends to slip up on these things as we get into hour number nine, as we finish up our day today.

We're delighted to have you with us, and we'll get to introductions in a moment.

We are essentially taking up, as you probably realize, consideration of the advancement of economic development in Canada's north, principally the three territories.

This is the second of three stops we're making in each of the territorial capitals. We were in Yukon on Tuesday and yesterday, we are here in Yellowknife today--and we'll be on a tour tomorrow before we depart--and next week we'll be in Iqaluit. These three visits are part of a larger and longer study on the whole topic. Most of the witnesses we'll hear from on this question we'll be hearing from in Ottawa. But we are delighted to be here in the territory, hearing from people and getting a true flavour of some of the issues that are in front of them in advancing this question.

We have a total of three organizations here tonight. As is customary, we'll ask for presentations from each of the three organizations, after which we'll go to questions from members, and there will be time limits on the questions.

I think some of you may have even been here, perhaps, witnessing how the last session went.

We'll begin with a director, Mr. Fred Koe, from Northwest Territories Métis-Dene Development Fund Ltd.

Mr. Koe, you have five minutes, or thereabouts. If it stretches to six or six and a half minutes, that's okay too, but in the interest of time we'll try to hold it at that. That will apply also to our other presenters here tonight.

Mr. Koe, you have the floor.

[Fred Koe, Director, Northwest Territories Métis-Dene Development Fund Ltd.]

Merci, Mr. Chair, and welcome, committee, to our north. Drin qweenzee.

I quess I can say I'm a true northerner from the Gwich'in Nation in the western Arctic, and I represent the Métis-Dene Development Fund, of which I am a director. We've submitted a brief to your clerk, and they will get them interpreted and passed around.

I just want to highlight some of the main points in the brief and focus on what we consider to be some of the barriers and some of the solutions, which I believe is your focus.

The Métis-Dene Development Fund, and I'll just use the acronym MDDF, was formed in 1991 under the Canada Business Corporations Act. We have two shareholders, the Denendeh Development Corporation and the NWT Métis Development Corporation. Over the years, we have lent out in excess of over $12 million to more than 200 Métis and first nations businesses in the north. Currently we have about 60 active clients, and we cover just about all sectors of the economy.

In the last year we've signed a new agreement with the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs called SINED, and that's a new one where we're now expanding our lending to non-aboriginal businesses in the Northwest Territories. The total loan capital for our corporation is now about $6.5 million. That's quite a leap from when we started, with just over $2 million.

Again, I'm just very quickly going through some of the highlights. I'd like to focus on some of the barriers to economic development, and I'm sure you've heard these. I've seen some of the briefs that were presented, so I'm sure there will be some repetition.

Underfunding, the ability to get equity to start up businesses, is one of the issues for organizations such as ours and others that are in the business, and it affects their ability to service and be in the smaller communities where people can access the services. After care is a huge issue because of the limitation of trained and expert people in smaller communities.

Another area is mentoring and job shadowing.

Bookkeeping is one of them as well. Again, businesses tend to centre in the larger communities and they try to service everywhere from places like Yellowknife, Inuvik, and Fort Smith, and of course they don't get into the communities where we want to keep our business people.

Technology again is an issue, such as high-speed Internet, e-mail, cell service. All that is a boon to having good business, the access to information and access to banking services that we in bigger communities get very used to. It's very difficult.

Procurement is another area where we feel there's a bit of a barrier because in the north we usually go south to get cheaper goods and services, which doesn't really develop the manufacturing or supply end of things in the Northwest Territories. And there are your freight costs. You guys have been travelling, and you're going to go to Iqaluit. You know the distances you have to travel; we do that as a matter of course.

Seasonality, with our short construction season, is another issue for many businesses that are in construction, and especially for ones that rely on government contracts and have to do their work in two to three months. Again, the profitability of trying to do that or do rush jobs is very difficult.

Banking is another one, getting access to capital or even payroll services. You need cash to do some of your business. Most places have a northern store or a Co-op store, and it's very difficult to access cash. So banks or other types of services that provide cash are a necessity. We talked about human resources a bit, the need for trained people and skilled people. You heard from the mining industry about the lack of skilled people and the need to train people to do work for them.

Government is an area where...there are a lot of agencies involved in economic development, both federal and territorial. Again, they do a lot of good work, put out a lot of good brochures, but really, at the end of the day, it's what gets down to the business level, and we find that a bit lacking. We need governments to not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk.

I'll talk bit on some of the solutions that we feel could help. One is funding for start-ups, equity funding or loan guarantees to assist businesses getting started. It's always an issue. You have lots of good people who want to start a business, good tradesmen especially. It's very hard to get funding to start up. Our aboriginal finance institutions and our Community Futures in the north have very limited funding. We're trying to service a large area--a small population but a large area--and we're always stretched thin. A lot of our money seems to go towards administration, which means less money for the actual customers.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We'll need to sum up if we can, Mr. Koe. I realize you've handed in a very thorough brief, and as you mentioned, this will be translated for the benefit of all members here and for consideration of our study. If you could just sum up, then we'll go on to the next speaker. It could be that some of this material you'll be able to get out as well in the course of questions that will come up.

[Fred Koe]

Okay, just to sum up then, there have been some initiatives. Just yesterday I saw an announcement from Industry Canada on providing service for mentorships for small business in the Northwest Territories. That's a solution that we feel can help. Communication, venture capital, low interest, an increase in our ability to get new technologies into the communities--all of that is going to help our businesses.

With that, I'd like to thank you very much for this opportunity.

Merci.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you very much, Mr. Koe.

We are honoured to have two chiefs with us here this evening, each from the Akaitcho Treaty 8 Dene.

Would you each like to have an opportunity to address the committee? We'll maybe split it up that way. If that's all right, then we'll try five minutes each and see how we work out with that.

First we have Chief Ted Tsetta. He is the chief of N'dilo. We also have Chief Steve Nitah, who is the chief for the Lutsel K'e.

Thank you very much.

Let's go with Chief Tsetta for five minutes.

[Chief Ted Tsetta, Chief of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation (Ndilo), Akaitcho Treaty 8 Dene]

Good evening. Thank you for taking this time from your busy schedule. We've been travelling just to be part of this, and I'm grateful that you could come into our hometown. This is our home. I'm the chief here, and I'm glad to see the panel. I speak on behalf of the chief and council, the elders, and the 1,400 members of my band.

You will probably know from television that the mining industry has been among us for 80 years. Yet economic development has always been on the other side of the fence. On this topic, we have a lot of detailed information that my colleague from across the lake is going to be touching on.

It's about time that Canada listened to us. As a newly elected chief, I know that there is an abundance of youth and elders who have not been represented. One of the reasons is that economic development and education are big ticket items here. We need to raise the level of education and keep pushing ahead with economic development funding arrangements. That's a big one. We need more direct funding to our first nation in order to move forward and become sustainable.

With that, I'm going to turn this over to my colleague, Chief Steve Nitah.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you, Chief. It is a great honour and pleasure for all of us to be here on your land. We've enjoyed a full day, and we welcome all of your presentations this evening.

Chief Nitah.