Bill Braden

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, colleagues, and every Member of this Assembly. Indeed, anyone who ever chooses to run for public office knows how intensely personal that decision is. For me, the choice was a combination of almost 30 years of interest and involvement in all sorts of elections and public affairs at every level of our country’s government. It was my various work experience as reporter, tourism manager, a small business owner, a senior corporate director, all of it here in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, Mr. Speaker, that gave me the sense that, perhaps, I could make a...

Mr. Speaker, thank you. My questions this afternoon are for the Minister responsible for the Workers’ Compensation Board, Mr. Krutko. It regards the plight of longstanding unresolved cases of injured workers and specifically the widely publicized case of Mr. Ivan Valic, a worker who was injured while he was helping to build the Ruth Inch Memorial Pool here in Yellowknife some 19 years ago now.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Valic’s case was a subject of a Supreme Court ruling that found the WCB’s policies and procedures wanting and an instruction developed to make sure that his case was reheard at appeal....

Merci beaucoup, monsieur le president. One of the most frequent issues that I have raised in this House and had a little bit of an inventory done 50 times, Mr. Speaker, in the last eight years, has been the plight of injured workers. It’s not about those people whose injury or disability has been expeditiously handled by the WCB and the vast majority of cases have, indeed, been handled this way. Rather, my concern has been for those injured workers that have complex, unconventional injuries who have challenged the WCB for years. In their quest for justice, some of them have lost virtually...

Thank you for that information. Does it not seem a bit unusual, if I could continue to direct the question to Mr. Bell, that we are undertaking this mission, yes, at the very end of this Assembly and our senior official, Mr. Handley, I understand is going to be leading the delegation. He is not returning to this Assembly.

---Laughter

How is it, Mr. Chair, that this government wants to undertake this when the Minister quite rightly points out that this should only be the first of many delegations and building this market? It just seems quite unusual that we are putting this together under the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the clarification. The detail that we were provided with, Mr. Chairman, explains that this money is needed because of higher than planned expenditures in these four different categories. This is obviously something that's in front of us every year. I wanted to ask to what extent is this a sustained trend and are we able to forecast and budget for these kind of costs with any more predictability, Mr. Chairman?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, I appreciate that in some of the really longstanding deals before the whole consciousness of environmentalism and liability was really at the fore, that our government probably did not include the kind of contingent liability things that we should have in the transfer. I accept that. The main purpose of my question here is to make sure that on each and every one of these properties that we're dealing with and potentially taking over, that this is one of the criteria that we're looking at to explore whether there was a previous owner/operator and to what extent...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we shouldn’t allow this to get into such a bureaucratic argument at this stage. I am disappointed to hear that the Minister says we should compare ourselves to other jurisdictions. We should compare ourselves to the contracts and things that are in place. Mr. Speaker, we really need to look forward in a much more progressive and collaborative way and rethink this. I will ask once again, is the government going to instruct the business planners to really rethink the way we set up our partnerships and our long-term business with these organizations?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am pleased to see that we are making some progress here, but I don’t know that I would say that allowing organizations to allow for forced growth really amounts to rethinking a partnership that we should engage in. Let’s connect the dots here, Mr. Speaker. There are homelessness issues, family violence and dysfunction, and mental health issues grow in our communities and become more sophisticated. We rely very heavily on these organizations to be the frontline, go-to places to manage this for us. But even as these issues increase in our communities, we are disabling...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to recognize in the gallery today Sue Glowach, a good family friend and also a great supporter of an organization that I have been involved with for some time, the International Exchange Student Organization. I know that her family will again be welcoming a student to Yellowknife. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

---Applause

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. A question of clarification. The information provided indicates that this amount, $3 million, is about 50 percent more than the amount originally allocated for this kind of activity here, which basically, Mr. Chairman, relates to rising expenses in out-of-territory hospitals, physicians from outside of the NWT. I just wanted to confirm, am I interpreting this correctly? Are the expenses that are being requested here, the funds being requested, about a 50 percent increase over what was originally budgeted, or can the Minister offer some context for this number?