Bill Braden

Mr. Speaker, one of the principles of the act is that both the manufacturers and the users of containers will pay for their use and that is, of course, from the manufacturing to the actual use and retail delivery and then the disposal. It’s a good principle. But it is something that, because there will be costs assessed at the retail and consumer level, is going to have an impact on the cost of these goods and materials. Can the Minister advise, either through the committee or his analysis, what will the impact be perhaps for the average northern family of the cost of implementing this? Is it...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Along the theme of waste reduction and recycling in the NWT, we go through something like 25 million containers a year for various products; 25 million among a population of just over 40,000. It’s a remarkable number and it’s one of the reasons that a year ago this Assembly passed the beverage container recycling act. My question is for the Minister of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development to ask him about when we might expect to see this act implemented across the Northwest Territories. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, through the course of this analysis and this work, will the Minister bring to the attention of the public and this Assembly any estimates or any projections on what some of those costs may be? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There was no other agency involved and the total amount of GNWT contribution to Nats’enelu was then $250,000. I just want to confirm those numbers so far. Thank you.

Okay. So it started in March of 1999 and up to what period? I am looking for the time frame here. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Okay, I’m still looking internally here. The Minister has said, if I follow, that any kind of accountability or if we’re going to hold our own people to account for their performance, if their duties are to watch and monitor and take suitable action on files, if they fail to do so then what kind of provisions do we have in our agreements or our contracts or our performance measures with them to see that they’re held accountable? I’ll leave it at that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the answers from the Minister. He did, I think in response to an earlier question, say that there is a process of monitoring and checking and vetting and confirming that what we are doing is indeed the right thing. Can the Minister advise of perhaps the most recent report that there may have been on that, or when the next monitoring or reporting cycle will come up? Thank you.

I guess to the aspect of accountability, Mr. Chairman, the Minister offered that the staff person who would have made these decisions is no longer at the department, and I don’t want to suggest that I or committee is out here on a headhunting expedition. It’s not our practice to bring forward the names of staff or go in that kind of direction. In the area of accountability, when things like this go off the rails, to what degree -- Minister Roland has talked to us about a third-party accountability framework -- are we going to be holding our own people accountable for the monitoring and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This gets us part way into the area that I would like to explore. The Minister is quite correct. You know it is in our policies and the limitations that we design and then we set in those programs. The people who actually deliver these, I have the highest praise for. They handle a difficult job and most of the time, Mr. Speaker, they do it very well. We have ways of monitoring those kinds of things that I have illustrated and that my colleague Mr. Zoe talked about, that have been there for years, Mr. Speaker. What are we doing to really address these issues? As...

Could the Minister give a little more history on these files? Over what period of time were contributions made? Was this a one-year occurrence or were there multiple years involved and what were those years? Thank you.