Floyd Roland

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have had no one from the public contact me or my office specifically; the issue has come from the Assembly here. We continue to use the policies that are in place. Any change in policy, we have a process where we go back to Members of the Assembly. If there’s a request by committee to look at that, we’ll take a look at that, as I responded earlier in an earlier question. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Yes, Mr. Chairman.

I would agree with the Member. That is one of the areas that is of concern to us when there are so many different levels of government at the table. That is why, for example, at the regional leaders’ table we agreed to work on a land use framework process. That work is ongoing and, in fact, moving ahead, I would say, at a fairly good pace, considering the complexities across the Northwest Territories, and we continue to put that effort into it. Hopefully, before the life of this Assembly, we’ll have something we can agree on together with aboriginal governments and ourselves. But that is the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Under the general operations and maintenance, under contracts, I’m trying to get further detail on that. We have contract services of $902,000 where he’s going back to 2008-09 actuals of $1.224 million. I’d have to get that information. I’d have to get the details on the difference there of what’s actuals versus what’s in the contracts registry department. The contracts registry area, the report is developed by ITI, I believe. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, the approval process is laid out. There are some dollar figures. So a contract could be let at a community or regional level and it could be let to a past employee of the Government of the Northwest Territories if they’re a year, two years, five years, ten years. As the record shows, and public accounts and our contracts document shows that there’s been those, an example of those, used by governments throughout different Assemblies on that initiative. Again, it depends on the dollar value. You could have directors issuing a contract all the way up to deputy ministers as well as up...

I would say there has been an improvement in the way we’re doing our business when it comes to our human resource plan. Number one, we’ve put a plan together. We’ve worked on the associate director position. We’ve also done a number of internal transfer assignments so we could have managers in training, and how we structured our negotiations teams, as well, has been positive. But for more detail, I’ll go to Mr. Robertson.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is under the executive operations area.

Mr. Chairman, in consultation with other departments, specifically in the one with land use frameworks, we would be in consultation with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to come up with a position that would be accepted by, for example, Cabinet. We would have to get a mandate to set the framework in place, and that mandate would be worked with other departments, then be accepted by Cabinet and go forward on that basis. That, for example, we discussed earlier, the mandate review that is happening and those are basis of our negotiation discussions. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The work that we could present would be work that has been done leading up to the proposal of devolution and resource revenue sharing. We haven’t done revised numbers since then, but that is the starting point for us and we could see if we want to go down that avenue. I would like to confirm that before we put what limited resources we have into updating numbers, is to make sure that we agree, as northern leaders, that, in fact, this path should be gone down and there would be support to bring one of these or both of these to a conclusion in our time. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, there is a cooling off period for DMs. I’ll have to check on the senior management file. Thank you.