Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon to the vice-chairs and the other members of the committee as well. Thank you for the invitation to appear before the committee today to discuss economic growth. We appreciate the committee's attention and focus on the north. I woul

Finance committee  I guess you mean the interest in the international community and definitely not the interest of the government. We're extremely interested in our resource industry as a government. I think what we're seeing, Mr. McLeod, is a change in direction. We've had some concerns over the

Finance committee  Do you mean in the mineral industry or outside of it?

Finance committee  I think our economic growth is part and parcel. We definitely want to make sure that we're moving forward in a sustainable manner with respect to our resource industry, but we also need to diversify. In tourism, for example, we need to do a better job of making sure we diversify

Finance committee  Both for sure. I will say next time you come to Yukon, make sure you come up to Dawson City. It's my riding, so I believe that it's the true heart and soul of Yukon. Next time, make sure you let me know when you're in town. You hit the nail on the head. Boom does turn to bust i

Finance committee  It's definitely a balance. We, as a territorial government, go to Germany, Japan; we try to invest in the international community based upon the statistics that we take. When you take a look at the Canadian dollar, you really want to make sure that Canadians are travelling to the

Finance committee  Thank you very much. Here in the north, we're very different as well. Devolution transfers happened in Yukon over a decade ago. We're ahead as far as land use planning and implementation of our land use planning process. That answers your questions a bit. Land use planning giv

Finance committee  That's a great question. When we started our devolution transfers, the intention was to give us the ability to make decisions for ourselves and to create more industry by having local solutions to local problems. We need to have a little more self-reliance there. We're no more or

Finance committee  Absolutely. Mr. Bagnell, as you know, my riding is Klondike, and there's no way someone's going to get elected in Klondike without being supportive of the mining industry. We struck a balance as a community. It's up to our government now to figure out how to model that community

Finance committee  I think with regard to certainty, it's about regulatory certainty. We're working right now to wrap our heads around streamlining our water licensing and our YESAB applications. In those, there are some board positions on a federal basis that are not whole yet, so it's a concentra

Finance committee  Yes. Take a look at Alaska. If you go into any small community, you'll see that all of their runways are paved. They have the money for the private sector to flourish in an area that needs that type of transportation. Currently, we're looking at paving the runway in my communi

Finance committee  I think we surprise people a lot of times in Yukon with how ahead of the curve we are in certain areas. One of the things that separates us from other northern areas is that all of our communities, except for one, are accessible by road. When you're transferring to a more modern

Finance committee  The biggest consideration when it comes to the GDP in Yukon is that we don't have a large, diverse economy compared to other jurisdictions. We're not there with agriculture. We're not there with timber. We have very certain sectors. One of our biggest ones is capital assets and

Finance committee  Yes. The intent is to make sure that all of the capacities are self-reliant and self-resilient. When I went to federal finance minister Morneau's office with the Teslin Tlingit Council chief, we talked about how partnerships with municipal governments and first nations government

Finance committee  That's a very good question. It always concerns me. Take a look at 2008 and 2009. We had one of the largest geochemistry “experiments”, I guess, for lack of a better word, in North America happening in our backyard in Klondike and throughout Yukon with the exploration boom. If yo