Bob McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s our intention to review the Summer Student Program the way we do every year. We’ve discontinued the hiring of students as of August 15th. We’ll review our practices. We will review the exit interviews that were done with summer students and we’ll assess how successful we have been. We think we’ve been successful this year, considering our fiscal situation. We’ve increased the hiring of the number of summer students from last year. We’re not aware of any significant staffing issues when it came to the hiring of summer students and we will incorporate that into next...

I would say that without the involvement of the different filmmakers we would never have gotten this far. They have been working with us every step of the way. Now that we’ve identified funding, they’ve been working with us to develop the criteria. Certainly I would want to continue to work with them and I would certainly like to see such an organization be developed, so we’ll work on that area.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are talking about an NWT film industry, so it’s our intention to go across the Territories and we’ll probably do it on a regional basis and update our website as we go along.

Thank you. I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Deh Cho, that Bill 17, An Act to Amend the Territorial Parks Act, be read for the third time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Yes.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To my left I have Deputy Minister Peter Vician, and to my right I have Kelly McLaughlin, legislative counsel.

I do, Mr. Chairman. I am pleased to introduce Bill 17, An Act to Amend the Territorial Parks Act.

It is time to modernize our legislation to match the same level of protection and security in other Canadian parks.

The proposed amendments relate to safety precautions and procedures that exist in most other Canadian jurisdictions.

These amendments will set a framework within the act that will give the department the authority to deal with specific concerns that have been identified repeatedly within our parks.

In addition to all of the criteria with regard to Safe Advantage program that we’re introducing, and I’ll just go through very quickly and I referenced several times the Government of the Northwest Territories Occupational Health and Safety Program and some of the things that we will be including are occupational health and safety management, occupational health and safety training, incident management, inspections, emergency preparedness, hazard management in Occupational Health and Safety Program evaluation. So we’ll have the structure and we’ll be working very closely with Workers’ Safety...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Our incident rates have been increasing for sure, but a large part of those costs are due to the fact that we’ve been paying compensation instead of focusing on medical rehabilitation and pension for injured workers. As a government, we’ve been working with other departments to develop occupational health and safety programs that will be government-wide, that all government departments will be represented on. We’ve been working very closely with the WSCC to have a blueprint or something so that we can continue to improve on our record. Through worksite assessments and...

In the Safe Advantage program there are three categories that one can fall under. One is where your performance is so good that you get a refund. The second category is where you are middle of the pack, so you have a neutral assessment. Third is if you’re in the category where over a three-year period you’re exceeding the average of $40,000, that you pay a penalty. So we’re in the third category where we have paid a penalty of approximately $243,000.