Bill Braden

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To item number 3 on schedule 2, Northern Addictions Services. Again I’d like to see if we can track some of the history and the layers that there may be in this particular request for a write-off of almost $120,000. I think it warrants some attention at committee level, Mr. Chairman. This is through the Department of Health and Social Services. Could the Minister advise if there was a cumulative history here for this $120,000? Could he advise on some of that? Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, then to add some numbers up here, we see that we have a total of $350,000 that was advanced to Nats’enelu from the Business Credit Corporation and the Development Corporation, and in addition about $430,000 was provided through other departments. So we have almost $800,000 by some accounting here to Nats’enelu, but we are able to go after $150,000. Do I have that right, Mr. Chairman?

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...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The sessional statement was a very extensive checklist of the initiatives that this Assembly has undertaken. Also, I think it covered a fair number of ongoing programs and projects that carry through from previous assemblies. I guess in this particular message, Madam Chair, I didn’t see any pronouncements or announcements of anything substantively new. Perhaps my expectations were maybe a little out of line in that respect, but it is an opportunity for the government to signal some new things that may be taking place out there or that are in the offing. It’s the kind of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I take it from the Minister’s answer that there is a considerable focus going on in the Housing Corporation for social renewing and modernizing our social housing inventory. I certainly support that. I restated or refined my question to look at the market communities, Mr. Speaker, where we already have a private sector base of developers and builders. But, for whatever reason, just in keeping up with demand, therefore, affordability and availability is very difficult. Is the corporation looking at all at anything beyond loan guarantees to the private sector to...