Implications of the Global Pandemic on NWT Indigenous Leaders Coalition Five-Year Plan. Addendum

INTRODUCTION Denendeh Development Corporation (DDC) has been working with the Indigenous community throughout the Northwest Territories to establish the NWT Indigenous Leaders Economic Coalition (the Coalition) for the purpose of taking an active, collective role in the economy. The Coalition was in the final stages of its creation and had worked to develop a Five-Year Plan just as the global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) led to government lockdowns of economic activity everywhere. One year later, as economies around the world re-emerge from the devastation of COVID-19, there is a need for the Coalition to revisit its plans given the economic landscape has been dramatically altered as a result of the lockdown. DDC has asked Impact Economics to investigate how this altered economic landscape might affect the Coalition’s five-year plan and to provide an addendum to that plan where necessary. There is also a growing assertion from Indigenous leaders that the re-emergence should not be one where the territory goes back to the status quo of the pre-COVID world. The global response to COVID-19 has demonstrated to the world the power of collective action, and it is this experience that many leaders (Indigenous and otherwise) are looking at when proclaiming that the world needn’t be as it was. That it can be better. It is in that spirit that DDC is approaching its investigation into what this new world might be in the NWT and how Indigenous peoples through the Coalition can become instigators and investors in that change. The research findings are presented in three chapters. Chapter one offers a high-level look at how the NWT economy has changed in the past year. Chapter two provides a review of recent literature on the “Emerging Stronger” notion. The third and final chapter proposes some changes to the Coalition’s Five-Year Plan.