Daryl Dolynny

Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. Mr. Chutskoff, Mr. Neudorf and Mr. Loutitt, welcome back to the House.

Committee, again we are on Bill 60, An Act to Amend the Motor Vehicles Act. I will open up to general comments. Mr. Bouchard.

So, what we’ve heard today from the assistant deputy minister is that $2.5 million, not $1.5 million, was deposited in our public accounts in May of 2014. Now we’re looking for an appropriation to spend $1.5 million. Where is the remaining of this money and where was it spent? Thank you.

So, again, things are coming down to some more clarity. That’s an August 31st deadline that Members were made aware. Prior to that I can assure Members here and those listening in, Regular Members of the committee here weren’t fully aware of the severity and the gravity happening behind the scenes. Of course, we all understood there were low water issues. I mean, we’re quite observant in that regard, but Members were somewhat handicapped, as I said, in terms of having this type of information. Now that we have this information and now that we’re discussing this here today, I guess my question...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I do rise in support of this motion and I would like to thank the mover, Mr. Bromley, and Mr. Nadli for bringing it forward today.

As I’m sitting here listening to my colleagues speak toward this motion, I am saddened for a number of reasons; we failed, plain and simple. I think Mr. Moses said it clearly, we’re so bogged down with all the things that are our day-to-day lives, we forget certain things and this is one of the areas that I think that even from a Member of this House, from a Member of the Social Programs committee, we failed, and I apologize to those with...

Thank you, Madam Chair. It gives me great pleasure to finally get to this part of the budget, which has been talked about here in the media for a number of weeks at the end of August and early part of September when residents were notified that the government took a lead action in trying to mitigate the low water expenditures or low water issue at Snare and Bluefish and took it upon themselves to give a bit of a bird’s eye view of what was about to come here today. This has been big in the making and I’m glad we are finally having an ability to talk about this appropriation in its full...

The report also indicates that enforcement offers what is called server training and conducts these courses free of charge to all NWT licence holders. This is voluntary, but the Liquor Board can order a business to attend at their discretion. Interestingly, for the past two years of this report, three communities, Fort Simpson, Inuvik and Norman Wells, had zero server training participants, yet once again it appears that in this 2014-15 report, 67 percent of the participants targeted and voluntarily forced to attend were from Yellowknife.

So once again, can the Minister indicate why the...

I appreciate the offer of the Minister, but the Minister clearly is aware. the sands of the hour glass are dissipating quite quickly. What he’s asking for in terms of number of days left is not feasible, it’s not going to happen in time. This is going to fall on deaf ears once again. It will be picked up by the 18th Assembly, hopefully, and through some stewardship that we are going to become better people at doing this job.

This is not the responsibility of a Member. This is not the responsibility of a committee to ask the government to provide information. It should be provided willingly...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. With the multiple number of reports being tabled in the past four session days, and no doubt right up to the bell later this week, I think Cabinet is hoping that Members will be a little too busy to follow up on all the plethora of paperwork before us. But there is one tabled document, 314-17(5), that was tabled on September 30, 2015, to which I’d like to ask the Minister responsible some questions.

The Minister of Finance tabled the NWT Liquor Licensing Board and Liquor Enforcement Board’s 61st Annual Report, 2014-2015, and within this report it indicates the number of...

Does the landlord receive an accounting of the money being spent in terms of, again, back to the proof of performance? Do we supply receipts as to contractor payments or of that nature? By which way does the contractor provide that information either through us, who is possibly doing our work for us, back to the landlord to make sure that we actually are following through to the T and I that we have in relationship to this agreement.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In keeping with my continuing evaluation of the current administration, today I wish to talk about our growth in the GNWT workforce.

It is a known fact that managing the size of government is an important component of fiscal performance. Compensation and benefits for government’s departments, boards and agencies account for approximately 40 percent of the GNWT’s spending on operations. With the 2015-2016 average costs of compensation and benefits for a government employee at more than $100,000 per year, we should give this some attention today.

The GNWT workforce, which...