Brendan Bell

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We will certainly sit down. I'll have the regional staff sit down with the community. The information I've been provided if we feel the commitment to sell the freezer was made. In other communities, there were one-time payments made for chest freezers. Those payments have concluded. So really it is a variety of solutions in a number of communities. But we will go back. If there was a commitment made and we have not lived up to that, we will. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Deh Cho, that Bill 12, Garnishment Remedies Statutes Amendment Act, be read for the third time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, let me say I agree with the Member that the urgency obviously with the weather turning colder is not as great as it was in the summer. We do believe that this is the model that makes sense, having people have their own chest freezers. The issue in Paulatuk where we have a large community freezer had the refrigeration unit go out on the equipment, much of the community subsistence harvest was lost is something that we don’t think makes sense anymore. We want to make sure that we hedge our bets and that everybody has a freezer, everybody who needs one. So we will work with the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As the Member has indicated, we have sent, I believe, 50 freezers to Ulukhaktok, 25 to Paulatuk, and obviously we have had some recent problems with the community freezer in Paulatuk. We are prepared to sit down and arrange for more freezers to come to the community, but we do need to talk to the HDC, the hunters and trappers. We need a request from the hunters and trappers. I understand the region is working with them now. We need to understand who the families are that are in need of freezers. We can’t determine that on our own so we do rely on the hunters and...

Thank you, Madam Chair. First let me again also have my thanks to Honourable Justice John Vertes, Eddie Erasmus and Rod O’Brien who put a lot of work into travelling and hearing from the people of the Northwest Territories and putting together this commission report. I think it was a very useful exercise.

As has been indicated here by a number of other Members, in hindsight maybe we should have sat down and talked about some more constraints on the commission in terms of limiting the number of seats and limiting the growth in government. I think that’s certainly something that we need to...

Mr. Speaker, I will have to check on that. It is my understanding that, in the past, we have used the barge schedule. We have needed some lead time to make sure that we could get the freezers ordered, on the barge and delivered to the community. I think the next opportunity is next summer to do that, but certainly let me see what is available in the region, Mr. Speaker, and I will get back to the Member. Thank you.

Madam Chair, I am sorry if it’s confusing the way it’s laid out here. The $300 currently could be exempted from seizure. So you could be left with only $300 if you had a court order against you. That was the one amount. Now it varies, depending on whether you were looking after children. There was a certain amount, if that was the case, but $300 was the number you could be left with per month. Now we are saying the most that somebody can go after is up to 30 percent net of what you make each month. Thank you.

Madam Chair, yes, to the first question. The second question as to how long it will take, it’s really in the hands of the judges. So I will direct my officials to raise this with the judges. Hopefully they are amenable and hopefully they can move this through expeditiously. Thank you.

Madam Chair, the amount referred to is after deductions. So up to 30 percent after deductions.

Thank you, Madam Chair. With me today, Reg Tolton, ADM, Department of Justice; Mark Aitken, director of legislation. Thank you.