Bob McLeod

Yes, I would, Mr. Chair.

We did have the environmental assessment report sent back by the Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs and we are doing an assessment of that. My understanding is that the Premier will be briefing SCEDI, I believe, or SCOPP within the next couple days or in March, I think it’s March 2nd there will be a briefing on the Taltson. So I think at that time you’ll get the full details of what is being proposed. The corporation is working on that and the Premier will be updating committee on that. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I believe there are two seasonal workers who work there.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I was going to say I will authorize a day off for them, but my understanding is that they are entitled to civic leave, all the recognition of Aboriginal days, all days through the Sahtu land claims are recognized as civic, but I will confirm that for the Member.

Mr. Chairman, through the tools that we have which are primarily the Business Development Investment Corporation and the Department of ITI and we are still waiting to see whether the Opportunities Fund will be a tool that we can use. We work very closely with the development corporations to develop capacity. We don’t give them counselling on specific projects or specific bids, but where they come to us for capital or for loans and we counsel them on whether we think it is a viable or feasible investment. We continue to work with them on an ongoing basis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I will be pleased to provide the Member with information on the number of employees with NTEC and with regards to an accounting of, or a reconciliation of, the numbers. We are quite open about it. We have provided this information on a regular basis to committee, and committee is well aware of what we did and it is no big secret. They dividend as they review, the team recommended that was part of what was causing the high cost of electricity. That will remain with NTEC for this year and potentially for further years.

With regards to the buy-down of the rate riders, we used money that had been...

We’re not running a fish marketing arm. We’re just assisting them with transportation and some core funding. The other jurisdictions have their own organizations. The Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation’s mandate is to buy the fish and also to assist in the harvesting. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is new to the 16th Legislative Assembly and I’ll have to go back and check our terms of reference as to whether we had identified that we would be fulfilling an annual report or not. I know that we haven’t been to date. It’s been more of a coordinating committee approach that would deal with specific projects and we would report on specific projects. Some of the main things that we’ve been working on that we will be reporting on is we will be developing and releasing an energy report that will be released in 2011. We worked on an electricity review. We’ll also be...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There’s two parts to this funding. It’s $300,000 for polar bear and $300,000 for caribou. They have to be resident of the Northwest Territories to be able to access the funding. Also, I guess you can’t be red-flagged by this government. So if you owe the government money, then we can’t discharge the funding. It has to meet some basic criteria to access the funding. The last time I checked there was maybe four out of seven caribou outfitters that accessed the funding for caribou.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the comments. We put a very concerted effort into reducing our backlog and focusing on our workload and moving to a client service department. We require all of our employees to take client service training. I think we’re starting to see the benefits of that.

Planning long term, we know that 40 percent of our workforce will retire within the next five years so it’s something that we have to plan for.

Aboriginal governments drawing down their authorities, we are very cognizant of that and we have been looking at that, their requirements for successor rights...