Bob Bromley

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It is also my pleasure to recognize all the students here today and their teachers. I especially welcome those who are residents of Weledeh, which includes Ndilo, Detah and Old Town, Niven Lake, that area. Welcome.

I also would like to give special recognition to the representatives from the Public Service Alliance of Canada, and Lorraine Hewlett, who often stands up for the public interest.

So that’s where this would appear. I appreciate that. What proportion of this would that constitute?

Mr. Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.

---Unanimous consent granted

That’s all I have. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to pursue this a little bit further. I appreciate the good information here. That was useful.

I guess I’m also looking at it for rate. For example, new litres of fossil fuel saved and the new greenhouse gas reductions by year for the past five years, so that I can see how much of the low-hanging fruit or whatever it is. Ultimately, the cost-benefit return probably starts to shrink a little bit. I would appreciate that to help me assess that, which brings me to the question.

What do we see as our biggest remaining opportunities? I’d say we are close to achieving...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I think everyone is aware that we have very serious issues of mental health and addictions in the Northwest Territories, some of the highest rates in the country by far. We also have very, very high rates of recidivism, and in our corrections these are obviously the results of our history and some of the major events there. Some examples of that are residential schools and the trauma that that entailed and still does to this day, a lack of early childhood development. As a result of these sorts of things, many people are still struggling and, unfortunately, we currently...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the work being done by my colleagues here. This motion asks for the government to initiate discussions with the Government of Canada on the Mackenzie Valley Highway into the Sahtu. It asks us to begin working a lot more seriously on capacity building so that we can nail down benefits from development activities. That’s a start. Obviously, this is only a start and I hope that as we get into assessing what the impacts are and what the responses need to be, and we need to get on this, we need to think about some of the hard, cold realities that are coming out...

I’ll help the Minister remember that. I guess my last one is with general procurement policies and practices. We have the opportunity to have a green element. In fact, we are bringing that lens to our own work now and enjoying, as the Minister reported today in his opening remarks, some significant savings.

Will this Minister work to get the environmental aspect into our general procurement practices so that when we’re asking for something to be done, an important element in the RFP is the environmental practices. An efficient product, how will greenhouse gases be handled in terms of mitigation...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I agree with the Minister. We want to do this properly, we want to do it quickly, and we want to do is safely. How can we do that when we’re nickel and diming this project?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I had questions, too, on contracting and procurement. Certainly, there is a very high rate of sole-sourced contracting. I believe it’s close to 25 percent; almost 50 percent when we throw in negotiated contracts.

The last time we looked at these processes, I discovered some shabby processes. For example, two contracts with identical work were issued to two different providers with, again, identical reasons, that reason being there’s only one contractor to provide the work. Obviously, that’s not satisfactory and I think there’s been some work done since then.

There are...