Caroline Cochrane

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I will start by saying yes because we've been on a roll, so I just want to say yes. There are many ways, the Member is absolutely correct. Our isolation costs are the major contributing factor to the cost of the secretariat. However, they are critical, so we are just doing that work right now. We're talking with Indigenous governments, municipal governments, other stakeholders in the communities to look at ways: do we pay for discretionary travel; do we look at RFPs or other options? The other thing, too, is: we've been working with the federal government to ask for...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to talk about the reporting back from Indigenous governments, and make that very clear. It's not that the Indigenous did not report back to me. It's that I didn't get hold of all the Indigenous governments. I had a meeting and eight Indigenous governments were there. Seven of the Indigenous governments, on that call, vocally stated that they support the secretariat, once I explained what it was. I had one in that call who said, "I need more information." That chief actually, once we gave the information, replied back to me and didn't say, "I didn't support it...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Absolutely. We had an initial meeting with the Indigenous governments, I can't remember if it was Friday. I believe eight Indigenous governments were there. Out of the eight, seven accepted. The Tlicho government was not there at that time. We did reach out to other governments, as well. Unfortunately, not all governments have had a chance to get back to me on that. I can say that the Tlicho government hasn't given their support, but they haven't said they're not supportive, as well. That is because we haven't had the opportunity to talk to them on that.

I can say that $31...

Again, when we first started addressing the issue of COVID-19 back in March, we didn't have time to put it out to tender. We just kind of grabbed what we could, trying to get people in safe isolation spaces. We've been operating in that. Again, one of the issues that we had when we didn't have a secretariat is all different departments were taking on different aspects of it. Now that we've formed the secretariat, Madam Speaker, we are currently actually looking at an RFP process so that we can provide better services, more efficient, and more effective services.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. What we've done already is we've provided I believe it was AOC committee with a paper that talks about what we're doing now, going out and engaging with the stakeholders, the municipal and Indigenous governments, et cetera, to ask about the isolation centres. That work happened last week. It's happening this week. What I can commit to is, once we compile those results, which will be in the next couple of weeks, I'm pretty sure, it will go through Cabinet. Then I'll be offering committee a briefing, or we will provide the information to committee. However, at any time, if...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Absolutely. I will talk about the engagement. The MLA is correct that we did not have good engagement at the beginning. We did offer AOC a briefing on it back in April; that never happened. We offered one again a couple of months later, and it got deferred. When we finally did get in, it was open camera, and it was our first chance to present to AOC. It happened to be public, so it wasn't the way I expected it to go. It's just how it went. That is just how things go when we try to be transparent. We all learn from our lessons.

Since then, I did engage with the Indigenous...

I would like to defer that to the Minister of Justice.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. When I hear that economic recovery has to take a feminist approach and it has to take an Indigenous feminist approach, as well, basically, that is saying to me that one size doesn't fit all. There is lots of research that says that once size doesn't fit all when we talk about many things in life. What does that look like? I think that the Department of Finance was one of the first ones to come out of the gate and say that they were starting to do a gender-based analysis of all of their work, and I think that that should go across all departments. Like I said, one size...

Madam Speaker, as COVID-19 approached at the beginning of this year, our government was preparing our institutions to respond to the threat of a generation. Before a case even reached our borders, we pulled together a team from across our public service to stand up for our emergency response. As the threat grew, so too did our response.

We declared a public health emergency; we restricted travel; we required self-isolation planning; and we put restrictions on businesses and people as the first COVID-19 cases were confirmed in our territory. We stepped up contact centres like ProtectNWT and 811...

I would like to defer that to the Minister responsible for the Status of Women.