North Slave Region

Something I'm a very big fan of down at Fort Smith is the Thabatcha Leadership Council.

I would love to see a North Slave Leadership Council come together so we can actually address, for example, with the defense spending, what socioeconomic benefits and compensation will look like.

We need to assure that through combined advocacy that these jobs, the labor, the investment remains within the North Slave.

Having combined efforts through all of the nations and the municipality to be able to come together and say to the federal government that this is what exactly that we want.

Please sign the dotted line.

We saw 100 years of gold mining and that was part of the old gold rush days across Western Canada that we saw up here in the Northwest Territories.

And when gold mining shut down back in 1996, and everybody was kind of asking the same questions they are today, which is what's next for the Northwest Territories, diamonds were discovered also here in the North Slave region.

And that led to a beautiful 30 year legacy of diamond mining in the territory.

Our first diamond mine did close in March of this year.

So I would say absolutely people want to stay here.

And the nice thing about the advanced projects that we do have in the territory is they are spread out in different regions of this territory.

Because while residents are used to that kind of two and two, the fly in, fly out, even from their home community, for the diamond mines that were largely based in the North Slave, a lot of our projects are on existing road infrastructure or close to it.

So that makes for a lot more opportunity for people to participate commute in and out from their home community, or at least close to.