The citizens of Yellowknife should be grateful to Arlene Hache, executive director of the Women's Centre, and senior citizens advocate Al Falconer for sounding the alarm.

They were responding with concern to a recent advertisement the city placed for a consultant to work on a feasibility study. The study would examine the transfer of services from the GNWT to the city.

Whether you call it downloading of services or community empowerment, handing management of health and social services to the city is a huge shift in responsibility.

The city has yet to decide if it is willing to take on these responsibilities. Before they make any decisions, council should ensure that it has spoken with the people in Yellowknife that are dealing with health care and social problems.

Professionals and volunteers who work in the field are people who know where the needs lie and where there are problems with either funding or administration.

Their participation in the decision the council makes is important.

Budget cutbacks have hit social services and health care hard. When the GNWT passes the responsibility, and the block funding, along to the municipalities, they are going to get an object lesson in the administration of the money.

Community empowerment, if that's what you want to call it, also means community responsibility. That's why this community's council has to consult with frontline workers before making any decision.

Yellowknife needs all the help it can get in coping with its problems. To not take advantage of the resources and experience at hand would be a serious oversight.

In this era of cutbacks and reduced spending, it would be an oversight we can't afford.

It's hard to imagine any government without an official opposition, but that's the system that has evolved in the North.

And the unofficial opposition, which consists of the ordinary members of the legislative assembly, has been criticised as being ineffective.

So, it seems logical that an informal opposition would be a good thing for the electorate of Nunavut, an informed eye if you will, to watch over the cabinet.

People in Nunavut would likely have welcomed the shadow cabinet years ago.

But one might also argue that the timing of the watchdog group couldn't be better, with division looming and extremely important decisions being made on a frequent basis.

MLAs like Kevin O'Brien and Ed Picco have echoed the peoples' concerns. But the words of two MLAs standing alone haven't been strong enough for the members of cabinet to listen, it seems.

The public's frustration about not being consulted before major decisions are made has fed a general suspicion about some of the GNWT's motivations.

At the very least, the anger that people feel is based on a lack of information about why the GNWT has the made certain decisions, like restructuring Eastern Arctic health care.

So if the ordinary members had done their job as government opposition, why so much obvious discontent within their electorate?

Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. is spending $100,000 on the shadow cabinet to put their money where their mouth is.

NTI has been, in the past, critical about certain government decisions, and has taken a hard line with the cabinet when peoples' interests were at stake. So this is really only a more organized way of doing what they have been doing anyway.

One can only hope that their voices will be strong enough to affect some change -- at least to reassure Nunavut residents that there is a critical eye on the politicians. If NTI succeeds in doing this, the money spent on the effort may well be the most effective $100,000 in public money ever spent.

While it may or may not be the responsibility of the organization set up to implement the Nunavut agreement to monitor the GNWT cabinet, no one else has thus far come forward to do the job.

Last winter, Yellowknife's Tara Hamer became the toast of our curling community after sweeping, throwing and sliding her way to national and international fame on the curling circuit with Canada's junior team based out of Nova Scotia.

Look out Tara, because here comes the Koe family. Earlier this month members of the family, who belong to different rinks, each had a share of a championship -- at the Hay River Arctic Brier (Jamie Koe), the Yellowknife Mixed Championship (Kerry Koe), the Yellowknife Senior Men's Championship (Fred Koe) and the Ottawa Welton Beauchamp Curling Classic (Kevin Koe).

Who would have thought Yellowknife would produce so many experts in the ice and rock field?