Charles Dent

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I guess I hope we don’t have to invest a significant amount of money in new correctional facilities in the Territories. I would prefer to see increased use of camps and other community-type facilities where possible. Those don’t tend to be as capital intensive. We’re hoping that the level of facilities we’re talking about here, that by 2010 we’re basically done with any big investments for quite some time.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have, as I’ve indicated to the Member, already written to the federal Minister. I will, if an opportunity presents itself…Perhaps since we will be in Ottawa in April, we may have an opportunity to put the case face to face to the federal government. I have also communicated with the MP for the Northwest Territories, Mrs. Ethel Blondin-Andrew, to express concern about this issue. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I don’t have the numbers in that form. But I could tell the Member that our records show that the average occupancy for the unit has been 5.5. It is a six-bed unit, so that indicates that, on clearly most days, the unit has all of the beds occupied.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I don’t believe that I told Mrs. Groenewegen that I wanted all-day kindergarten funded. I think if you want to check the record though, the Standing Committee on Social Programs brought forward a recommendation to this House, which was voted on and passed by this House, that the government funds all-day kindergarten. So there has been a motion passed. It was presented by the Standing Committee on Social Programs. At this point, there hasn’t been a motion passed on this recommendation on remand, so I'm in a position where the Member is asking me to accept that all 11...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is right; the engineer’s report is out. The engineers are confident that the school is safe. It is not in any danger of a situation developing that would be unsafe for the students or the staff in the building. We are going to have to do more work this summer to assess just what sorts of repairs need to be undertaken. It appears that one of the biggest problems was that when the addition was added, they didn’t put an expansion joint between the two parts of the school. So they are moving at different rates, the two parts. How that is going to be handled...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Right now the stage we are at is trying to decide how much of the act we need to open up. We are taking a look at our act in comparison to other acts across Canada to get a sense of where we might be lacking or where there might be room to go to the public and say is this an area that you want us to look at. So I’ve been discussing with the department just what the approach would be, whether we’re going to do a full-blown public consultation of the whole act or if we would just narrow its scope to the areas where we’ve had highlighted now that there may be problems....

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. At this point we are just in the process of beginning to start to get the statistics on the activities of the community justice committees. We have only recently been able to provide all communities with that $20,000 in extra funding for them to hire a part-time coordinator. Many of them didn’t have the resources before or even the ability to collect the statistics of what they were doing themselves. That was one of the reasons for looking at this as a needed investment.

Now the committees have someone or should have someone available who can start to collect some...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member raised this issue with me some time ago and in taking a look at the Condominium Act, I had to agree that it looked like there might be some area that we were not looking at. So I’ve asked the department to compare our Condominium Act with those acts across Canada. I think the area that we might be somewhat lacking in is whether or not the reserve fund is considered to be adequate. That’s the area that I think they’re going to have to examine; whether or not we should insist, like Alberta does, that there be an independent review by an auditor as to...

Thank you, Madam Chair. With me today I have the deputy minister, Mr. Don Cooper; and, the director of finance, Ms. Kim Schofield.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have to follow the guidelines set out by the federal government for the program. I can tell Members we are nowhere near satisfying the demand. I believe this year we had a waiting list of people who did not get any funding through the program because there was not enough money in the program to address all of the requests. The other problem with the program is it will not provide funding to Metis people. That’s something I have consistently written to the federal Minister and demanded that they reconsider their approach to this program, but I have not been...