Floyd Roland

Mr. Chairman, we will give you a list of the contracts we have with Aboriginal Affairs. If the Member asked me a question in the House about contracts with others through other areas of responsibility, I would be able to provide him an affirmative at that time. Thank you.

I guess one of the things, we have looked at all of these and a number of these negotiations have to occur to bring final clarity as to the roles and responsibilities, but clearly, if you look at chapter 5, Transfer of Responsibilities, existing rights, 5.3, the transfer of administration on control of public lands and rights in respect of waters to the Commissioner, pursuant to Section 5.1 shall not: (a) affect any existing right or interest or trust including any existing interest in respect of public lands; (b) affect any existing right including any existing interest in respect of waters...

Mr. Chairman, for the most part right now what we use as guiding principles are the key features document and the federal government’s self-government policy. That is what we work off of and then mandates are developed around that as we talked about, many of those being redone. The government’s framework will be an internal document used by governments as we set up our mandates and look at that framework. Policy then potentially could be developed that would be a public document like our Negotiated Contracts Policy where we would set out some of those principles that would be incorporated into...

The simple fact is that I’ve said many times in this House, and the Member may call it procrastinating, but I’ve talked about the fact that if it’s the will of this Assembly when we do initiatives, then we’ll look at how we put them in place. The transition documents we would be working on together. If it’s the will of the Assembly, we’ll be prepared to look at that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Out of total employees of 40, we have 13 that are P1, 14 that are P2 and the remainder are P3. The combined that would fit into our Affirmative Action Policy is 67 percent. We have no one self-identified as disabled.

Mr. Chairman, I wouldn’t say we hire consultants. What we have hired in contracts for example under Creating Our Future, we have hired a writer. We have hired facilitators to do that work. As I pointed out earlier, when we have our office position in Ottawa take annual leave, we have to hire temporary staff there as well. Thank you.

The message that’s gone out is one from our office at the Executive because we held the agreements with the groups and have identified them in past discussions. The groups had to sign off and sign contribution agreements. The summit process was one that was initially made up of the leadership. The Member is correct that it did get tied into hiring of a lot of additional... Well, I don’t know if it was a lot, but it was considered to take out and it evolved into more of, for no better words, a bureaucratic process between consultants and lawyers and groups with some mixing of political...

Mr. Chairman, the Member has recalled, in fact, a significant piece of work we are working on. I am hopefully in the near future able to bring it back to Cabinet and then go to Members with the work that we have done in that area to update it. Thank you.

We do have multi-year funding processes in place. Some organizations, again non-government organizations, as we’ve heard from the Minister of Health and Social Services are doing their review of how they would continue with that funding process. Clearly we do have multi-year funding in place.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To my left is Gabriela Sparling, deputy minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Intergovernmental Relations, and to my right is Richard Robertson, director of policy, planning and communications. Thank you.