Bob Bromley

Thanks, to the Premier. I note from Mr. Pollard’s statement that the one board proposal will “maintain the co-management foundation of the land, permitting and water licensing processes set out in the Gwich’in, Sahtu and Tlicho agreements and the act.” But he goes on to say, “The proposed changes to the act will not provide for regional panels.”

I can’t reconcile taking away regional panels with maintaining a local and regional co-management promised in the First Nations settlements. Could the Premier explain this government’s position on whether this proposal is consistent with this government...

I don’t expect the Minister to have this information immediately at hand, but I wonder if he could provide us how many nurse practitioner positions there are in Yellowknife, in the regional centres and in other communities that are vacant at this time.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the Minister’s commitment there. Another big component of the high demand for a boat launch and parking facilities is the high number of illegal occupations on federal lands, squatters that use the boat launch and so on. I’ve received an assurance from the Minister of MACA that there will be a call for aggressive federal enforcement of land law. These squats debase our tourism product as well as for the local law-obeying citizens. I’d like to ask if the Minister will work with the MACA Minister to push for federal enforcement of its law.

I appreciate that information. I did not hear anything about the child and family services prevention programs that we had recognized are needed here. There’s a national case going forward today where one of the workers we had involved in the review, Cindy Blackstock, is sort of leading the charge to take the Government of Canada to court, I believe, on their failure to appropriately fund Aboriginal children across Canada. I want to know that we are doing funding as we should be. There were a number of things that were identified, but funding is obviously only part of it.

We have funding in...

I look forward to that update. I guess really we want to be staying on top of our facilities such as this in a timely way and before they disintegrate to this degree, making the corrections that are necessary. What are the mechanisms that we have to regularly monitor the health of our facilities such as the Prelude Lake boat launch and so on, and for taking action to get those repaired in a timely way?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to just mention the program to renovate Stanton Territorial Health Authority to contain and remediate the mould issue. I’m happy to see that that has gone forward. To me it really is a reflection of the state of that building, that desperate need to do some work on that building, as is the second item regarding the repairs and modifications to the sterilization steam equipment. I hope the Minister sees it as the same, as some flags.

We have postponed and postponed and postponed renovations to Stanton Territorial Hospital. We are beginning to pay the price. Well...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Negotiated contracts such as that proposed for Det’on Cho Corporation to realign Highway No. 4 play a critical role in the Northwest Territories. The Negotiated Contracts Policy is intended to lead to benefits which could not reasonably be expected through competitive processes which maximizes economic benefits for NWT residents and businesses, provides training and development opportunities, and supports the development of self-sustaining local and regional businesses. That sounds to me like a checklist of the merits of the Det’on Cho negotiated contract proposal for...

Thank you very much for that. So I just want to get back, the Minister of the Housing Corporation also made some comments a little bit earlier and I want to say that, and I’m tending to talk about the bigger picture here, so I want to acknowledge that the Housing Corporation has actually done quite a number of things in the area of energy efficiency and so on.

What is happening here is they are sort of at the mercy, as are all ratepayers, of what systems are available in our communities across the Northwest Territories. They are also in a very important position, being the Housing Corporation...

Well, Madam Chair, I’ve been elected to not necessarily bang my head against the wall, but I have to try until I’m no longer in this position.

The Minister says no, we’re just going to keep doing this. That’s just not good enough. We’re struggling to get an increase in our debt limit and I guarantee that this investment would pay back big time, pay back periods of whatever, five to eight years. How long have we been doing this? We know this is going to continue until we’re completely out of federal dollars, 2034 or ‘37, whatever it is, and how long have we been doing this? This just makes sense...

Thanks to the Minister for that response. I don’t disagree with him. There are cases when we need to respond, but there are quite a number of cases, as we’ve heard from the comments and as we will hear as we go through this, where I think we could have done a better job and we need to start doing a better job. It’s very tough. We’re talking services now. It’s very tough to say no at this point in time when the damage has been done. So that sort of behaviour and allowance perpetuates itself. That’s what I’m talking about.

There are a number of items where I think we could probably find general...