Bill Braden

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Standing Committee on Accountability and Oversight conducted its public review of Bill 21, An Act to Amend the Public Service Act, on March 7, 2005. The committee would like to thank the Union of Northern Workers for their presentation and the Minister and his staff for introducing the bill.

The committee is generally supportive of Bill 21, which will result in long overdue improvements to the staffing appeals process for public service jobs. The committee noted that many of the proposed changes to the process are not included in this bill and will instead be...

Mr. Speaker, I’m wondering if the Minister would perhaps even broaden that to include the whole of the Mental Health Act. It is a sizable piece of legislation and given that some…I know there are many of these larger pieces of work that really are carried over from one term to another, they will take more than the years that we have left in this Assembly. Would the Minister take a serious look at investigating and modernizing the whole Mental Health Act? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Some of the things that the Speaker has outlined are indeed still of concern to me. We are creating this advisory committee, and to paraphrase the Speaker -- to work out the basis of its relationship with the Board of Management -- I would respectfully suggest that that is backwards. It should be the Board of Management that is laying out the terms of reference and how we would like the commission to serve the Assembly.

I look at this, Mr. Chairman, in the overall context of good governance, that we have a responsibility here to be clear and direct in our...

Mr. Speaker, in my statement I was talking about the changes in legislation that have come about as compelled by what’s going on out there on the streets and especially in the area of recognition of human rights and other new laws that are entrenching the rights and freedoms of the individual. Mr. Speaker, I’d like to ask the Minister, how serious is the gap in our legislation regarding current laws on mental illness? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have one more motion to read. Mr. Chair, I move that this committee recommends to the Department of Executive to consider different options to use already existing personnel and resources to create a consistent system of coordination in the regions;

And further, that the options be presented to the Standing Committee on Accountability and Oversight prior to the committee review of the 2006-2009 Business Plans. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today, I would like to talk about mental health and mental illnesses, Mr. Speaker. In our modern society, mental illnesses and disabilities are viewed a lot differently today than they were even a few decades ago. We see this in many different ways, Mr. Speaker, in our own homes, in our hospitals and community care centres, in courts and legislatures. We are dealing with this terrible affliction more progressively and compassionately. There is, through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Human Rights Acts, a much greater emphasis on the individual’s autonomy.

The...

Very briefly, Mr. Chair, just to set the context. In committee’s review of the budget and the draft mains, we were acutely aware, of course, of the changes and the impacts that were to happen and, in fact, did happen as a result of Ottawa’s uptake on the NWT’s agenda. The Premier should take no small amount of credit in that. But we also were well briefed and quite appreciative of the reliance that we now have on these panels, the Expert Panel on Equalization and the Council of the Federation panel on fiscal imbalance. They kind of have a lot of our fiscal future and wellbeing in their...

I guess the aspect that I was looking at, Mr. Chairman, and the Premier referred to it, was really the across-government. Not so much I don’t want to isolate the Executive or any department, but it’s that across-government expectation of communication. One aspect of this is, as the Premier pointed out, where each department has one or two communicators and many of our boards and agencies also have those kind of functions within them, we’ve seen a couple of interesting moves fairly recently, Mr. Chairman, with technology where we’ve kind of brought together our IT people into a service centre...

That is it. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As Mr. Menicoche highlighted when he read the report, the area that rose up from our briefing with the Minister on this was the growth in separate fields, Mr. Chairman. The mandate and the role of IGRASP, as relates to the mandate and the role of Aboriginal Affairs; the crossover and overlap that these two agencies were starting to see.

Also, Mr. Chairman, as the report details to some extent, the creation or jockeying of senior deputy positions to try to accommodate this. The recommendation that committee has made here, Mr. Chairman, is that we would like the...