Floyd Roland

I think that question is a very big question politically on future development of our Territory and the understanding and relationship we have with aboriginal governments, and that is why the Northern Leaders’ Forum plays a critical role as how we go forward. The next piece of work we’re going to engage in is the political development of the NWT with the regional leaders. I think that will go a long way in establishing the relationship forward and building the support for further discussions around devolution and, further to that, the resource revenue sharing piece.

Right now, it’s been a...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Although we’ve heard something of discussion out there about a group who has gone on-line to raise concerns about the high cost of energy there has been no request made to Members of this Cabinet nor, as is my understanding, to Regular Members as well.

While there are definitely times when an aboriginal group or even the federal government may say that we’re slowing the process down there are many occasions when we help move things along. For example, in helping writing the proposals and the frameworks as we go forward and one of those examples, again, in sharing information upfront is the self-government financing piece where we went to all of the groups to identify the model we put together and showed them that model and what that, as a basis, potentially meant for implementation and the cost of implementing these agreements. So that’s an...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The increased travel results from an increased travel on the 2011 Census report, so we will be going to all the communities to help with doing that census as it happens in 2011. As well, because we are starting to step up on our devolution discussions again on re-engagement, we have increased travel there to about $20,000, we’re estimating, and then the rest of that will fall into the increase related to projects from the forest services in rural remote communities is another one of those reasons. That goes to my opening comments talking about recommendations made by...

I know the Member is very adept at looking at how we do things as a government and his professional expertise in areas, but he seems to cover quite an area from climate change expertise right down to now contracting, and if in fact the work that we get is quality work or not. We can debate that quality here and we do that. The issues of the work we do as a government, the nature of that work that needs to get done and the timing of that all comes into place when we make decisions. In fact, again, the Member says that the public is outraged at this or very concerned about that. Between an...

Mr. Chairman, I don’t have that information handy with me, but we can get the previous work that was done in this area. Of course, if we were to progress down this path we would probably have to… I know we’d have to do an updated review of positions identified in the North. Thank you.

No. Maybe a little further to that, Mr. Chairman, that, in fact, when you look at our Northern Leaders’ Forum, in trying to come up with a common vision of the Northwest Territories, that is one of those areas where we can come up on our own, working together and finding the principles we can agree on and move forward on and probably move things along a little further. But, again, each region is somewhat different, even when you’re looking at the types of programs and service delivery that want to be drawn down. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, the area of the contract services, there are a number of contracts that carried over from the start of this government. We entered into a number of contracts to help us establish our links between ourselves and Ottawa, as well as provincial governments and some of the initiatives we were undertaking. What’s happened there is those contracts have ended and not been renewed.

We could create policy on the fly here if that’s what Members like. There’s a process for dealing with policy and there’s also the Financial Administration Act that’s in place that stipulated levels of authority for contracting. There’s a Financial Administration Manual that is a part of the process. That work is actually ongoing from the Department of Finance looking at the Financial Administration Act and the FAM, as we call it, or Financial Administration Manual. That’s being looked at overall in the government how we contract. For the actual policies themselves, there are issues and...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To my left is Mr. David Stewart, assistant deputy minister, executive operations; and to my right is Mr. Alan Cash, assistant deputy minister, secretary to Cabinet. Thank you.