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NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
During two days of caucus meetings in Dettah, the territory's 19 MLAs met as equals to draft a vision for their government for the next four years.

The document, titled Believing in People and Building on the Strengths of Northerners, lists increasing the number of jobs in the communities, diversifying and strengthening the economy and addressing health care and housing needs as priorities for this government. Building relationships with aboriginal governments, pushing for devolution from Ottawa and raising the territorial borrowing limit were also tagged as goals.

Inuvik Boot Lakes MLA Alfred Moses said each MLA came to the table from Nov. 15 to 16 with their five most important territorial priorities. These priorities did not reflect each MLA's personal constituency issues, however, which, Moses said, allowed the group to put together a vision that takes the entire NWT into consideration.

Moses, who is also the deputy caucus chair, said the government wants to send the message that it is in place to assist Northerners to improve their lives, but not to sustain them.

"The programs are out there and we want to educate people that they are not dependency programs, but programs where they can achieve better living conditions," Moses said.

In the document, the goals of strengthening relationships with aboriginal governments and pushing ahead with negotiations and implementing a final devolution agreement are included in the same sentence.

At a glance, these initiatives would appear to represent contradictory goals based on the public opposition from many aboriginal governments on devolution. However, Premier Bob McLeod believes closer partnerships with these groups will increase communication and provide for more concrete talks on the subject.

"The approach that we are taking is that one doesn't necessarily exclude the other," he said.

"A lot of the aboriginal governments have said that if it was explained better, they might have been in a better position to support it."

McLeod said the government must also reach into the communities to better explain what a devolution deal means, so that it is better understood.

While neither McLeod nor Moses would discuss specific programs or areas the government was looking to promote, McLeod said the government would look at decentralizing jobs out of regional centres and into communities.

"In some of the smaller communities, we have 50 to 60 percent unemployment," he said, adding positions should be relocated to "where they make sense."

Moses said the Tuktoyaktuk to Inuvik highway, a Mackenzie Valley fibre-optic link and a public housing rent scale review were initiatives the government was pursuing.

McLeod said most of the specific initiatives will come out during the government's business planning and budgeting work.

"We tried to stay away from being too prescriptive," he said of the government's goal-setting exercise. "We recognized that if everything is a priority, you can't really have a focused approach to things. In the past, we took a job description approach, whereby we identified all of the priorities we had and tried to make sure we didn't leave anything out."

McLeod said the government will continue with many of the initiatives from the last government.

"There was a strong realization that, to make real change, especially when you look at social programs, you can't just focus on your four-year election term. A lot of change takes 10 or 15 years," he said.

McLeod said the government's program review process - instituted as part of the last government's refocusing government initiative - has come up with a number of recommendations "on improving government operations and structures." However, he mentioned the details would come out in the government's business plan.

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