Bob McLeod

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following document entitled Northwest Territories Film and Media Arts Industry: Growing the Sector. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you. Mr. Speaker. In December of last year the department met with the deputy ministers of all the departments and advised them of the process for hiring summer students, the need to register on the public registry and the need to have a continued support to hire summer students. We follow that up with regular updates at deputy minister meetings and also letters to the departments. We also raise them at ministerial meetings. So in every opportunity, we encourage departments to increase the level of hiring of summer students. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

In the short term we will be doing up a contribution agreement with the Smart Society, and the reason for that is, as everybody knows, there is an election coming up and we can’t commit a future government on future funding, so we will also endeavour to include that in the transition document.

I think it’s very important to note that in the future we’ll be looking at expanding to other initiatives, and long term, hopefully, it could become part of one of the TFC finance projects in the future. But that’s in the long term and we’ll have to wait and see what happens in the next government. Thank...

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Inuvik Twin Lakes, that Bill 11, An Act to Amend the Public Service Act, be read for the third time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following two documents entitled 20/20: A Brilliant North Action Plan (2011-2012) and Results Report (2010-2011); and Report on the Staff Retention Policy Year Ending March 31, 2011. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Going back over a number of governments, there have been a number of attempts at decentralization and there have been successful initiatives to decentralize. I can think of the health care cards to Inuvik; I can think of the forestry division to Hay River, amongst others. I think that the last time a government took a serious look at decentralization it only got to a certain point, because you wind up with winners and losers. You have communities that lose jobs and other communities benefitting.

I think the best chance there is for decentralization is with devolution. We have to make sure that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have that information and I’ll provide it to the Members.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We met with the NWT Smart Communities Society and all the Yellowknife MLAs, including myself, and we recognize the good work that the Smart Society has been doing. We committed to working with the Smart Communities Society to deal with some of the programs that they have been working very hard on over the past three years.

I’d like to point out that over the past three years Smart Society spent about $11 million on their programs, and this year, in order to access $385,000 from the federal government, they were looking to expand their programs across the Northwest...

At this point, recognizing that as a government we’ve been flat-lined for at least 10 years where 31 percent of our 5,000-plus workforce is Aboriginal, we’re trying to get that moving upward. At some point when we come fairly close to 50 percent I think we could expand it into other areas. For example, we know that of our senior management component, 16 percent is Aboriginal. We have an even steeper hill to climb there. We can character the extreme. We have 33 communities in the Northwest Territories. Every community has varying percentages of Aboriginal people. It’s not our objective to have...

As of May 18, 2011, 3:00 p.m., we have 166 summer students hired: 91 are indigenous Aboriginal; 75 are indigenous non-Aboriginal; zero other summer students. We have 16 job offers out for signature: four to indigenous Aboriginals; 11 to indigenous non-Aboriginal; and one to other summer student, for a total of 16 job offers out there. Thank you.