Caroline Cochrane

I hear the MLA. We do have priorities that we have to get on with. We have normal business that we have to get on with. When we first started with the COVID response, you're right, we did not go to the public when COVID-19 hit and the Chief Public Health Officer said we're shutting things down, we're tightening up. We didn't have time to do proper consultation with the public, to do proper consultation with Indigenous governments, municipal governments, all applicable stakeholders. We need to have those border controls now. I am all about stakeholder engagement. Ask any Minister here. I say it...

The Member is absolutely right: the secretariat was not in our priorities or mandate, and COVID-19 was not in our priorities or the mandate. I think, if it was, we might have changed our priorities and our mandates. However, we have what we have, so we go forward. Mr. Speaker, again I take ownership because some things we were trying to get off, we were trying to do, everybody was scrambling to make sure we had services in place, and we knew that some of the services on our side were breaking down. Things were coming really fast. The structures were not as good as we were used to. I made the...

The end-of-the-year funding is not an issue new to this government. It's an issue that I think people have known about for years and complained about. When I was in the NGO world, before I came here, actually, I noticed that we always got contracts at the end of the fiscal year and did not have enough time to fulfill those contracts. It was always an issue. Therefore, I brought that up in the 18th Assembly when I was a Minister at that time, and I was assured by the Finance Minister in the last Assembly that they were on it and that they were watching it. I challenged them all the time, and I...

The COVID secretariat actually houses a number of functions. It houses our border controls, it houses our enforcement for COVID-19, for the CPHO orders. It houses 811 and ProtectNWT, our isolation units, and our PPE for anyone who is non-health: our schools, our NGOs, our municipal and Indigenous governments. We are looking to see if we can contract some of those pieces. We have recently identified a local warehouse provider that has the potential to hold our PPE inventory, so that is one area we're looking at. I know that we've gotten questions on the floor about the border down south, in the...

[Microphone turned off] ...department, which would be the Minister of ITI. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I said that you will see that the supps will be coming later, and if the Members don't decide to support it, then we have to go back to doing what we can. Yes, we could give $29,000, I think the Member said, to every business and not have border controls, not have isolation units, not give out PPE to our students, to our kids at most highest risk. We can do all that, but does it make sense? COVID-19 is raging in the South. They're in their second wave. The numbers every day are increasing. Should we not put our isolation units and our border controls and our enforcement and our PPE for people...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Absolutely. The COVID secretariat was not something that just came up and we said we are going to have a new agency because we had nothing better to do. It came out of trying to do the best we could. Again, when COVID-19 struck, every single department -- and again, I give nothing but credit to those employees who stood up and said, "I will help to try to save our residents of the Northwest Territories." They were doing it off the sides of their desks, some of them doing that full-time and trying to do their normal jobs off the side of the desk. It was unsustainable...

Again, one of the major issues that we had and why we wanted to bring it under one agency, the secretariat, was because the components were all in different departments and sometimes the right hand was not keeping the left hand aware of what was going on. Under the secretariat, it does bring it into one area so that we are on track and we all know what's going on, working together. Communications within the secretariat, we have three positions, I believe, that were in that because, before, communications were spread between every department and, again, it was an issue.

With the secretariat, you...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are a variety of things that we're looking to do with this. We are, of course, making sure that we're working closely with the Chief Public Health Officer regarding corridors. Where she goes with that will impact on our isolation units, but there are things we're doing. We're looking at perhaps whether we can contract out the services and if that has the potential for better service and for cost savings. Sometimes, that happens. We do have, not a lot, Mr. Speaker, but I want to clarify, a few people who use our isolation centres fairly regularly. We're looking at...

When I first began here a year ago, I said that I wanted to engage with stakeholders more, businesses or stakeholders, a sector. I do believe that Ministers, again in the beginning, were engaging, out there talking to businesses, doing the best they could, and then COVID-19 hit, and everybody went into lockdown, right across the territory. That impacted our communications, no doubt.

However, now that we have a little bit of knowledge on where we are going, the systems we need in place to deal with COVID-19, all Ministers have been back at it and trying to engage more with stakeholders. It's not...