Bob Bromley

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I noticed the Minister focused on the one negative of the Nunavut side of things. The income may be different but, of course, one would hope that over time a family’s income rises rather than goes down, in which case it would actually be a benefit in allowing them a little adjustment time.

The Minister has heard me cite the commonly heard case of people refusing work to avoid radical increases in rents. In carrying out the Shelter Policy review, can the Minister give information on what other more flexible models are being examined? What options are available for...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to support my colleagues Mr. Hawkins and Ms. Bisaro in raising this issue in seeking some focus, as the Minister has offered towards moving forward on the Sissons School maintenance deficit and renovations are clearly required.

I’m wondering where we’re at with pellet boilers with our schools. How many schools do we have in the Northwest Territories and how many of them are now using wood pellet heat and are there opportunities for additional movement in that direction? Maybe that’s something the Minister could provide at a later date.

I guess with my last point I...

I appreciate the response from the Minister. I will look forward to the results there. It’s my understanding that under the current funding arrangements, local housing organizations who do not meet their rent recovery targets lose operating funds equivalent to the amount of uncollected rents. This is a very retrograde approach, because whether they collect rent or not, their costs of providing housing don’t go down. It only digs a pit of debt, and I realize there’s a balance here. Can the Minister say whether the options being considered in the Shelter Policy review include the possibility of...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I had indicated I would like to follow up on the specifics by division and so I will here, very briefly.

The proposal for a tank farm to increase capacity and upgrade, code upgrade, and I understand there are some serious challenges, structure challenges that need to be corrected in this community. I’m happy to see that work being undertaken. But I do want to stress again that there are opportunities to avoid the costs of in this case doubling the storage capacity and, of course, with that, the ongoing costs of forever trying to meet the new environmental standards and so...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would also like to recognize Patrick Joss. The committee has had many occasions to visit Ulukhaktok to do our business and on every occasion Patrick has been there to help out the committee. Thank you, Patrick.

It’s certainly been brought up for many years by MLAs. I’ll leave it at that. Thank you.

Thanks for the Minister’s response on that. I will follow up on that.

The other question I had was if the deferred maintenance is not responsible for the schools, I’m wondering if there’s any GNWT role in getting that deferred maintenance done. We seem to, obviously, be doing it for a lot of schools elsewhere. How are we and when are we going to make sure it gets done by whomever is responsible? For example, Sissons School in Yellowknife. Thank you.

That’s all I had. I think it might be interesting for committee to get a briefing on the functional aspect of it since we have had some briefings that suggest that that is important to the successful operation of the hospital. I will ask for that at a later time, but thank you for that information.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just again, in reverse order, where is then the maintenance work being planned? How is it being planned? What are we doing to ensure that the work is being done, for example in Sissons School in Yellowknife?

On the general purpose office building, of course, I disagree with the Minister. I think it’s entirely possible that the space be made available for arts without any impact on the private sector here. They don’t currently have it and there is an opportunity for paying for that, in fact, in working cooperatively with the federal government.

I would just like to note...

Some of the tours we’ve had of the hospital and talking to the CEO there and so on, there needs to be a lot of sort of functional studies done on what departments in the hospital need to be adjacent to each other and so on. A lot of that can result in highly increased efficiency of operations and so on; the lack of it, of course, increases costs. I’m wondering, has that work been done. Has that work been done or is that being done in our current fiscal year? It’s obviously not part of the schematic plans. It doesn’t seem like it would be, but I’d be interested to know that. Thank you.