Bill Braden

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Is that the extent of the information that the Minister is able to provide?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I give notice that on Wednesday, August 22, 2007, I will move the following motion: Now therefore I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Hay River South, that this Legislative Assembly strongly recommends the Minister responsible for the Workers’ Compensation Board extend Mr. Denny Rodgers’ appointment as chair of the Governance Council to April 12, 2008. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

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....

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Minister just told us that ultimately it’s the cost that this Assembly has to consider. Mr. Speaker, is the Minister at all considering the need that the people of the Northwest Territories have for the service? Isn’t that really our primary job here?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions this morning are for Mr. Roland, Minister of Finance. It relates to the situation or the increasingly desperate situation that our non-government organizations, especially in the social service sector, find themselves because of financial constraints. Mr. Speaker, in summarizing the overall findings of a recent study of staffing, the author of the report on behalf of several organizations states that unless there is a major rethinking over the next few years, the agencies that are now contracted to handle this kind of thing will not be able to continue to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the eight years I have served as MLA, few issues have received as much attention as the chronic financial problems facing our non-government organizations. These are agencies like the YWCA, Council for Persons with Disabilities, Sport North, and, as my colleague from Hay River South highlighted so effectively yesterday, the Northern Arts and Cultural Centre.

Over the years, these volunteer-driven agencies have become reliable, trustworthy and essential partners with our government in the delivery of an immense range of services and programs in virtually every...

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?