Nault offers $3.7 million in federal funding
Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Dec 13/00) - It was a long way to come to deliver it, but the message Robert Nault came to convey was clear: his Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development will help back the economic development of the North.
Nault, together with Western Arctic MP Ethel Blondin-Andrew and an entourage of staff commuted aboard the government's Challenger jet for a half-day visit to Yellowknife Monday.
The main event of the visit was a signing ceremony formalizing $3.7 million in federal funding announced Nov. 14. The money will shorten a bridge-building project for the Mackenzie Valley winter road to two years from five.
The bridges are expected to extend the winter road season from five weeks to eight weeks.
Nault said the funding characterizes his "two track" approach to bettering the lot of Canada's first peoples by settling land claims and helping develop aboriginal economies.
The contribution is the kind of initiative that "enables the people of the Northwest Territories to realize the potential of their land and resources."
The $3.7 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the $330 million non-renewable resource development strategy delivered to Nault and his cabinet colleagues last spring.
But it is the only response the government has received to the strategy so far. The territorial government was hoping to get some of the $230 million in its share of the $2.65 billion national infrastructure development program announced last spring.
The fear in the North is that infrastructure funding will be distributed to the provinces and territories on a per capita basis.
Nault said that is the approach the federal infrastructure program is taking, but not the one he chooses for the distribution of his department's economic development funding.
"The objective of that is to look at it from an economic point of view, about creating first nations economies, about business plans that make good sense at the time, and not being driven by formulas that obviously are there under the national infrastructure program," Nault said.
"I'm not looking to just sort of take the political easy route and have a little bit for everybody across the country and say, 'I've done my job."
