Caroline Cochrane

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I wish to advise the House that the Honourable Julie Green will be absent from the House later today to participate in a conference call with federal/provincial/territorial Ministers of Health. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I'm here to present Bill 33, National Indigenous Peoples Day Act.

The National Indigenous Peoples Day Act, which is intended to repeal and replace the existing National Aboriginal Day Act which came into force in 2002.

In this bill, the term "Aboriginal" is being replaced with the term "Indigenous Peoples", which is more inclusive and is also consistent with federal and internal naming conventions.

This proposed bill is intended to honor and celebrate the culture and achievements of First Nations, Metis, and Inuit people of Canada as well as the Dene, Metis, and Inuvialuit people of the Northwest...

Mr. Speaker, today I am speaking about family and gender violence. This is a painful subject for so many people. I will now pause for a moment, Mr. Speaker, to give survivors the opportunity to choose whether they would like to listen.

We are in the midst of Family Violence Prevention Month. I would like to recognize that November 25th was the beginning of the 16 Days of Activism Against GenderBased Violence, and the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The 16 Days are an opportunity to come together as Canadians and with partners around the world to call out and...

Thank you. Madam Chair, I have Christina Duffy raise your hand director of legislation division, and Ms. Lauren Alexandra is the director of shared corporate services. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Stanton recruitment is for the Minister of Health and Social Services. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, since the onset of the COVID19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, the health and wellbeing of the Northwest Territories and residents has been our number one priority. Today, we are slowly emerging from the worst outbreak of COVID19 our territory experienced. At one point, the NWT had the highest number of active COVID19 infections per capita in Canada. However, through collaboration and partnership between GNWT departments and authorities, community governments, and Indigenous government partners, we have been able to support residents and communities in need.

ProtectNWT is...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, I think for me the most notable change I made on the mandate, we did talk about doing this work, we talked about developing training and delivering it to people, but in the mandate we never talk to who was going to do that. So the mandate could have been that headquarters because traditionally headquarters does do those things and would have defined it. What's different now, Mr. Speaker, is that it's not only headquarters defining this work. It is the regional managers that are helping define it because it's the regions that are experiencing this problem. So, again...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So that is some of the areas that we want to talk about.

Throughout our review, we started with doing an internal review of the current processes in regards to human resource and financial authorities. We looked at job descriptions, etcetera, and we realized that there weren't any discrepancies within them. There is an issue. And when we did a -- we've done surveys with the senior managements in the rural -- smaller communities, etcetera, and they identify that there's an issue, the feeling of empower. So that led us to say even though our job description say it's all...

No.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So, again, like I had said earlier, in regards to making legislative changes or changes to the Executive Council, that wasn't seen to be an issue. The job descriptions are on par. The initial service that we did identify, that there are problems. When we asked what the problems were, people just identified headquarters, not enough power in the regions. So in fact, that didn't give us enough information in all honesty to be able to do a final assessment. So we're now in the process of hiring a contractor -- last question -- and we'll be doing one on one interviews.

The...