Bob Bromley

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to ask a little bit about the family violence and counselling. I know we’ve had our third, sort of, Phase 3 recommendations on this area, and this year we weren’t able to advance on all of those but I think there was general agreement to them as priorities. Could I just get, maybe, an update on what we’re proposing to do in this fiscal year under consideration here in the way of addressing family violence and the Family Violence Plan, Phase 3.

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...

Thank you. Thanks to our fiscal procrastination we are now passing the point of completing a half-life retrofit on this asset.

The Minister of Finance commented publicly that we need to spend $200 to avoid replacing the hospital for $500 million, but I’m sure everyone here will agree that’s very much lowballing the estimate of these costs. Many suspect our procrastinated renovation may be pushing toward 300 and 400 million dollars in the billable amount, the longer we wait and current proposals are again nickel and diming. You’re stretching this out over decades, despite the Minister’s...

Thank you. Very quickly, Mr. Chair, the Minister mentioned the $175,000 going to the Yellowknife homeless day shelter. That’s an increase, I believe, in recognition of the pulling out of another partner, but the City of Yellowknife has very graciously put in extra dollars on the condition that the dollars that they’re putting in are met by this government. Does this amount, $175,000, meet the conditions and thereby enable the City of Yellowknife to contribute their full amount? Do we know offhand? Thank you.

We’ve fiddled and faddled so long the midlife window for Stanton Territorial has almost passed. The Finance Minister urges thrift today for a better tomorrow, but tomorrow is here.

I’ll be working with all Members to put the human needs of our constituents first on the list of our next capital budget and I will have questions for the Minister later today. Mahsi.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is a page where, obviously, prevention is big. We’ve talked about it on just about every topic that comes up and I just want to stress, again, that that’s often where I’m coming from. I know the Minister is too.

I view early childhood development programming as the number one opportunity we have in prevention. We have Dr. Corriveau with the Minister’s department working away on a framework. I hope we’re going to come up with a really community-based focus on young families, that sort of approach. We have what we have for resources and as we really go to...