Caroline Cochrane

Thank you, Mr. Chair. On my right is deputy minister of Municipal and Community Affairs, Ms. Eleanor Young. On my left is Ms. Christina Brownlee, who is legislative counsel for the Department of Justice. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We do look at it. We do take responsibility. We recognize that we need to make our housing units as safe as possible for all residents of the Northwest Territories. We can't act on speculation, though. We need to recognize that people have human rights. We get a lot of people who complain about their neighbours. We can't just jump on every complaint. We need proof. I do hear the community, and I do hear that it is an issue. I am encouraging people to actually step forward and actually bring it to our attention, but also call the RCMP.

We are bound by the law. Like I said, one of the factors...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Our current policy on bootlegging or selling drugs, trafficking, is that we do follow the Residential Tenancies Act, which says that no one shall commit an illegal act or permit another person to do so. That is in our lease that people sign, that they are not allowed to do that. If that someone is reported to the local housing organization that they suspect their neighbour is selling drugs or bootlegging and is causing a disturbance, the local housing organization will go over and ask the person who the complaint is against to make sure they don't disturb their...

When I talked to the first question and was answering about what our policies are, we do have a policy that says that if someone is convicted of a criminal offence, the local housing organization can -- and specify "can," not "shall" -- can terminate that one person and ask for the other family members to be able to stay. "Can" is not good enough for me in our policy renewal.

We are looking at it within a gender-based analysis, which means: how does that affect people? When I look at the gender-based analysis within the Residential Tenancies Act, currently, it only states that we can ask one...

Absolutely. I consider it a problem that we have people who are maybe selling drugs or maybe bootlegging in our housing units. We have children in those units. We have family members. It is a concern. However, I am bound by the law, and as so, we have to respect the law. The law does specify what exactly we can do when we look at evictions. Although I would love to be able to go and kick out drug dealers, suspected, or every bootlegger, I have to abide the law, which says that I have to have proof.

As I said before, the Sport North Association paid for transportation costs to get all the youth there. Based on that, then, I cannot ask them to refund for youth who took alternative methods. I will look into it, though, and make sure that Sport North only had the charter from Yellowknife and that there was no other option, understanding that, of course, the charter, if there was one from Simpson, was weathered in. If there was a charter arranged to get the youth from Simpson, then I will not reimburse that. If there was an expectation that the youth would have to find their way to jump on a...

The transportation costs, Sport North was already covering these transportation costs to get into the trials. Unfortunately, some of the youth decided to take alternative transportation to try to make it, and my understanding is that, if they would have stayed in place, they might have actually made the trials because the weather was better in that community the next day. So we will not reimburse the travel expenses, but we will reimburse the registration fees that these youths paid because it is not fair that we charged them registration and they could not attend. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Unfortunately, I, too, felt really not at ease when I heard that the four youth from the MLA's region were not able to attend the games. There were other youth who were affected, as well. Sometimes when there are tournaments going on or children are out of the province, they often don't get to attend the trials, so it is an issue. With this one, the weather was a problem. We do ask Sport North and the Territorial Sport Organizations to try to accommodate whenever possible. We're reviewing at this point. Because of what happened, we're looking at different options that we can implement in the...

Mr. Speaker, one of our government’s mandate commitments is to implement online delivery of a community government training curriculum to build the capacity of community governments. I would like to inform Members about the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs’ progress in the development and implementation of web-based training opportunities for community governments.

Web-based training enables community governments to access training at a reduced cost, lessening both travel expenses and time away for staff. The department’s new training opportunities aim to meet the diverse needs of...

The MLA is correct. The Government of the Northwest Territories provided Sport North with the funding to provide transportation for the youth. As stated earlier, I will check into Sport North and, if they did have a charter, so transportation arranged from the community of Fort Simpson, and the youth did not get a chance to do that, then I will not reimburse them out of pocket because that was part of the deal. If they were asked to make their way to Yellowknife to get onto a plane and they were not reimbursed for that, then I will look into that and provide reimbursement for that cost if that...