SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Remote NWT communities could be seeing more Mounties this year. The territorial government's 2010 budget came with a $1.1. million commitment for more policing.

Finance Minister Michael Miltenberger said the money will add RCMP officers to smaller communities.

"We're looking at supporting communities so the RCMP can provide service and be able to get in more frequently to provide the support they need, in some cases to communities that have no police presence at all."

Miltenberger said the money wasn't a direct response to the shooting death of RCMP Const. Chris Worden, who was gunned down by a drug dealer in Hay River in 2007. But he said the days of single-person detachments are no longer a reality because many communities require three or four officers so officers don't have to work alone. Miltenberger said he didn't know how many more officers the earmarked money would hire. He had no specifics as to where, if any, new detachments would be.

"What we're talking about is more of a community support function," he said.

A further $158,000 will be put towards training court workers to reduce drug- and alcohol-related crime.

More than 34 per cent of the Department of Justice's budget goes toward law enforcement.

Public housing goes local

The administration of the Public Housing Rental Subsidy Program is moving back to the local housing organizations.

Finance Minister Michael Miltenberger said the move will improve the service clients receive. The move got mixed reviews in the legislative assembly on Friday.

The program's delivery was transferred to the Department of Education, Culture and Employment in 2005.

"We don't have an endless pot of money," Yellowknife Centre MLA Robert Hawkins said. "Our government should be supporting self-sufficiency and self-reliance."

Hay River South MLA Jane Groenewegen, who had been pushing for the change, quickly responded by thanking the government.

"We caused some great stress to seniors living in subsidized accommodations," she said, about the shift in administration.

"We did do the wrong thing in transferring it over ... I hope the harm caused will be reversed."

Education, Culture and Employment Minister Jackson Lafferty said it cost $1.3 million to do the initial transfer but said switching the program back to the local housing organizations didn't necessarily mean the 14 positions created by the transfer would be cut.

Singing the Sahtu blues

Sahtu MLA Norman Yakeleya treated the legislative assembly to an impromptu performance on Jan. 28 when he read a rendition of the Barenaked Ladies pop song "If I had a million dollars."

He changed million to billion and re-wrote the verses to reflect his constituency's concerns. Many of Yakeleya's verses rhymed like, "I'm not just thinking about the Sahtu, I'd support all the other communities, too.

"I'd keep the resource revenue in the North, too, and Ottawa would think that's cruel." If I had a billion dollars, I would speed up the Mackenzie Valley Highway, so the Sahtu can greet and treat you to a hot caribou stew, too."

The assembly responded with a round of laughter and applause. Yakeleya's foray into spoken word, delivered as his member statement, came on the heels of Finance Minister Michael Miltenbeger's budget address. Last week, an MLA in New Brunswick, the province's former Attorney General T. J. Burke, made headlines when he sang "Pants on a ground," a song from American Idol to chastise a Conservative opposition member.