Bob Bromley

Thanks to Mr. Guy for that information. How long has Education had it and when do you need an answer to get the work done by this fall?

Again, I’ll leave it at that and I don’t see the commitment. We’ve dedicated a paltry $5 million to this long-ignored situation and half the work got done. What kind of commitment is that? I’ll leave it there.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is a $125,000 counter of cans and jars, I suppose. It seems like an awfully expensive piece of equipment here to be proliferating, especially to simply count the number of cans being recycled. I know we hired some consultant I have never heard of here to come up with that idea. I don’t know what that cost us, but I’m pretty suspect about this.

I have had occasion to take recyclables out to the recycling location here for return on deposits. I believe most of us do that in our own communities. The folks that are counting those do it lickety-split. With the glance of an...

Madam Chair, I have to say that this has been a decade-long procrastination in striving for an effective response by the government to the deteriorating conditions at Stanton Territorial Hospital. I know others regard this as an utter disgrace and failure to deliver on our responsibility to provide priority and best care hospital services for the people across the NWT. Here we have yet further information that we are continuing to fail to perform these duties even on the relatively modest work that has been authorized in light of the work that we know is needed in the order of 200 to 400...

Mr. Chair, thanks for the Minister’s commitment. I guess there is an obvious concern if four PYs are being done by equal and other jobs. Obviously, they are not able to do their jobs, unless they are super people or unless we have a lot less work for them than what we are paying them for. Obviously, I don’t think we can count on that as something to give us assurance that the public is being well served. I know the Minister is aware that I appreciate that he is focusing people to be kept trying to do what they can to make sure the services are rendered until we are fully staffed up again, but...

I don’t have anything further. I guess I’m not inspired by that particular response because I’ve heard it many times before. The proof will be in the pudding, but I do take the Minister that he will be putting best efforts out there. I guess I throw out the idea that looking for some specifics might help direct those best efforts. That’s all I have.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a couple of comments here. I understand that this money is for, I believe there’s office space that has been secured, but it’s for developing the office space. But this is for moving, transferring the Business Incentive Policy monitoring office from Yellowknife to Hay River and the motivation, according to our information, is a decentralization effort. But I’d just like to point out some of the fallacies here of the plan that this government is pursuing right now.

If you look at, in fact, the number of jobs per capita, Hay River, or the South Slave, has the highest...

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thanks to the Minister for his opening statement. I note we’re 32 percent carry-over. That’s a pretty high number. I believe if that’s the case, our capital budget from last year was about $225 million; $75 million, or about a third of that, was carried over. I know in the 16th Assembly we had a Deputy Minister’s Infrastructure Subcommittee that tried to focus on getting that number down. I think the lowest we reached was about 24 percent. Maybe I could get the Minister’s perspectives on this. This was a relatively modest capital budget compared to the capital...

I appreciate that information on the ongoing interest of the Minister there. I guess it doesn’t address my point, though, that when we know we are going to lapse from these large adjacent back projects, significant dollars that would be huge to the Detah road project, that we identify those early on and enable that Detah road project to go forward until the bountiful federal government comes forward with additional money. This really is the GNWT’s responsibility. Thank you.

I will look forward to what the Minister concludes on that one.

On the issue of emergency response, the worst situation would likely be a fire during the deconstruction, which would cause immediate downwind threats to human health. AANDC says there’s an emergency plan in place and warnings would be issued, but even if I heard a siren, I wouldn’t know what to do. Go inside? Listen to the radio? This information should be easy to communicate through ads and flyers delivered to homes.

Will the Minister again commit to contacting his partners and urging them to advertise and distribute detailed...