Floyd Roland

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, what we've done to date is I've just signed off a letter to the organizations, both parties, to urge them to get back to negotiations. From the side of delivery of services, we are prepared for those who are seeking support in the area of addictions help, that we would ensure that services are available to them whether in the territory or out of the territory. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the arrangement we have is with the Dehcho Health and Social Services Authority who then has a contract in place for delivery of these services with the Nats'ejee K'eh Society. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we just went through the first phase of that, recognizing what needs to be done to clean up our older version of 8.3. It was significantly customized, as we call it, where we changed the programming to fit our criteria, which lead to further problems. So we’ve had to go through that phase. We are now entering into the next phase of beginning the work to convert towards 8.9, the vanilla version, as I stated earlier. Hopefully, as we proceed this year, I’m looking towards, I believe it would be April 2007 that we would be able to be fully into the 8.9 process...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as issues arise with our human resources side of government we have to look at all factors, no matter the small amount of people that would raise concerns. We have to look into them to ensure we are doing what we can to try to deal with those. Obviously as we do some changes for one group it affects another group and that can raise issues on its own. We are doing a better job, I believe, when we look at most of our facilities. When we do a comparison across Canada with our health facilities, the shortage of nurses is still a thing that affects all...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the issue of recruitment of nurses for the Government of the Northwest Territories is, in fact, an area that we focused on. In fact, as of July this summer, we, within the human resource group, pulled a number of people together and their sole focus is dealing with the recruitment of nurses. Since July, we have been helpful, in fact, in pulling together and hiring 55 indeterminate or term nurses in that time period. So that unit is starting to work. We have had to make a number of those adjustments as we’ve moved along to fine tune HR and the way we do...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, since taking on this activity and putting human resources into one area, dealing with the backlog files, a number of things I’ve put in place to monitor the work that has been going forward. One, it is on the pay side of the equation on our backlog what gets done. The second piece, and becomes more critical, is the benefit side and the backlog there. In both sides, pre-September 2005, and post-September 2005, because that is when we really started pulling things together within the department to try and smooth them out and get the flow working. We do...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I guess I can speak from some experience from around this issue as I was around when Nunavut was created, and our Assembly in the pre-Nunavut days was larger and went down by 10 Members. We, in this House, had 24 Members at one time representing Nunavut and the Northwest Territories for just over 60,000. When Nunavut was created, 10 Members left and we had 14. We governed with 14 until the next Assembly. A boundaries commission was established to go out and look at the seats. There were questions looked at. Ultimately, they came back with a...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as the Member stated, our job in this Assembly is to deal with the constituents that come through our doors on any particular issue. So there’s no fear there. As well, our employees have to realize that because we’re within a union, there’s a process of dealing with issues. As Members come to our door or come to my door on a human resources issue, my first response would be where it is at in the stage of dealing with our systems in place with the union and follow that process through. Mr. Speaker, just for stability of our workforce, we do have to follow a...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, to actually get a breakdown of the full amount of employees and break them down whether it’s casual employment or indeterminate would take a bit of work. But I know on average there are over four and a half thousand employees across the Northwest Territories that we run payroll for. So you do your payroll. In fact, for example, when you deal with terminations there’s a lot of people coming and going within government and an average monthly…For example, in the last nine months, Mr. Speaker, the average monthly termination process we’ve dealt with have been...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as soon as the AOC committee is going to give me some time that we can bring a briefing forward, I will gladly meet with them to schedule something and give the latest information on the work that has been done. Thank you.