Bob McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In our government’s restructuring of the board authorities, where we’re moving to one health board to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the health system of the Northwest Territories, part of the planning is also to look at the Hay River Health Authority and to examine the feasibility of bringing it into the public service at the appropriate time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

MRS. GROENEWEGEN:

So, would it be correct to characterize that this is not imminent at this time and could I also ask if there’s been any recent costings of what the price tag would be to our...

I should point out that the advertising campaign was focused solely on northern papers. I should also point out that devolution has only been in place for 10 months and previous devolutions when we’ve devolved and evolved, normally it would take about a three-year period. I know that we do have a process already for dealing with legislation and I expect it would go through that process. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Since May 20, 2014, the public has had an opportunity to go online and review existing devolution legislation. We have encouraged all interested parties and Northwest Territories citizens to take the opportunity to learn about it a bit and understand the new authorities exercised post-devolution by the Government of the Northwest Territories. We have had two advertising campaigns, in May and November 2014. The review period was extended to enhance the opportunity for citizens to examine and comment on the legislation. Thank you.

The Minister of Health has identified this as a priority and we’ve realized that if this had been done some time ago, it would have been a lot cheaper. I think when it was first looked at it was going to cost about $7 million; I think it’s more than that now. We do have information available and we can get it and provide the latest estimates to the Member. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, we have already launched two advertising campaigns where we strongly laid out that the objectives of the review are to encourage the general public to better understand the legislative process associated with devolution and give them an opportunity to review the legislation and to ask questions of clarification.

We also have communicated an evolved process and the review was to gather initial public responses, questions and suggestions and also to provide the general public with an understanding of the legislative process for amendment of existing bills and development of new...

There have been 2,091 legislative review website views. There have been 272 visits to the Q and A and comment page. Only two questions have been submitted for response. So in our view, the level of response, we don’t foresee any immediate changes to the legislation as a result of the review. Our expectation is that the responsible departments will review the 26 different married regulations and acts associated with devolution in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In this case it was the NGOs in question. Thank you.

Thank you. The Third-Party Accountability Framework results in three categories of third-party funding. The first category is for major service delivery bodies and that provides for multi-year funding through the business planning process.

The second category is for other service delivery and commercial Crown corporations that don’t have large infrastructure, and in those cases there’s a mandatory budget consultation with the funding departments.

The third category is for the much smaller, quasi-judicial, smaller NGOs and those are annual funding requests or application-based. Through that...

The Government of the Northwest Territories has what we call a Third-Party Accountability Framework and that is to deal with third parties who provide services and programs to the Government of the Northwest Territories. In the interest of accountability and transparency, we have a framework in which we determine the level of accountability for third-party agencies, which includes political risk, financial risk and results risk, and on the basis of that rating we put them into three categories, which determines the funding process that we use. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to advise Members that the Honourable Glen Abernethy will be absent from the House today due to illness. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.