Bob McLeod

Thank you. I guess the reason summer students are hired in January and February is we ask summer students to put in their applications by the end of December of every year. So for 2012 we ask the summer students to put in, those interested in getting summer employment, to put in their applications by December of 2011. So we’re quite prepared to look at the process. If it means that we should wait until April for summer students to put in their applications and have everybody compete for every job and if we think that works out in the best interests, we’ll be prepared to look at that and see...

As I’ve said many times, our staffing in the Government of the Northwest Territories is based on merit. If the Member has any incidences where he’s seen hiring done because of who you know, well, we certainly want to be made aware of it so that we can investigate.

In every instance we try to follow the merit principle. As far as hiring of summer students, if he wants to hire only the most experienced summer students, only summer students that are in the fourth year of their programs... We try to make sure that we have a mix of summer students and we try to make sure that we hire as many summer...

In the past when we looked at developing the NWT film industry, we had concerns that we wanted to make sure that the Northwest Territories benefitted. Through the work of the consultant, we were able to identify that NWT filmmakers were causing the Northwest Territories to benefit to the order of magnitude of $9 million, and that was without the government investing any money.

We do have the approach to collecting this information. We’ll continue to do it. We will collect it on a regular basis. It’s our intention to continue to invest, and invest more money as we go along and as our government...

We do work very closely with the Department of Education. As a matter of fact, our offices are right next door to each other so we interact on a regular basis. We work together very closely on a number of these strategies. We developed the NWT Arts Strategy and we all participated at NWT House. We’ve been working on a cured show, and it is our intention to work very closely on promoting and developing the NWT film industry. We will be meeting as we go forward and work together to promote this.

Mr. Speaker, one of the key goals of the 16th Assembly is having a diversified economy that provides opportunities and choices for our residents. I believe this Assembly has made tangible progress toward that goal.

The past few years have been challenging. Our territory did not emerge unscathed from the global economic recession. However, we are recovering from the recession, and although our economy faces challenges, we know these challenges come with opportunities.

Through the life of the 16th Legislative Assembly, the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment promoted the development of...

I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Inuvik Twin Lakes, that Bill 18, An Act to Amend the Public Utilities Act, be read for the third time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following document entitled Agriculture Products Marketing Council 2010-2011 Annual Report.

I think we can do this relatively quickly because we know, as the Member has indicated, Inuvik has gone to gasification and they’re having some issues. I know Tuktoyaktuk has been looking at converting to community gasification by doing the same thing as Inuvik. Norman Wells has been looking internally what they can do to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, and we’ve been doing a lot of work both in the private sector and in the government on biomass. I think we can look at all those various suites of energy generators and see what the best way forward is when we can do that fairly quickly.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. At the time -- and we have to remember that this process started about 10 years ago -- it was envisioned that it would be a stand-alone community gasification process and it was proceeded on that basis. We’ve gone forward with those communities where it seemed to be feasible. During our interventions, during the Joint Review Panel hearings we made representation that provisions should be made to offload from the pipeline to convert these communities to natural gas if it was deemed fit to proceed. That’s the reason we proceeded on that basis.

Thank you. I think looking at the statistics, in this year we hired 286 students. Fifty-nine percent of the summer students hired were Aboriginal students or P1s, 40 percent were non-Aboriginals that lived more than half their life in the Northwest Territories, what we call P2s. So I’m not sure what the Member is suggesting the problem is. Is he suggesting that we should only hire high school graduates for one year so that we can hire the most students without any experience? I’m not sure what the objective of his line of questioning is. So maybe if he could clarify that, we can make some...