Glen Abernethy

I don’t have the exact numbers for housing inmates in our facilities, but the number the Member quoted sounds right. I will confirm that actual number for the cost over a year.

As far as the exact numbers for inmates who are taking advantage of this -- and we must remember that inmates aren’t required to go to wilderness camps, they have to express desire and an interest to go to the wilderness camps -- but I will confirm to the Member what the costs are per day, but also the whole program costs as well.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to recognize three people in the gallery. First, my father, Dick Abernethy; my mother, Loretta Abernethy; and my wife, Carolyn Smith, who is awesome by the way.

There are a number of categories of harassing behaviour covered under this policy and they include harassment, personal harassment, sexual harassment and abuse of authority. The policy also has an accompanying guide to apply to the policy which reflects current practices and processes for informal and formal complaint resolutions, demonstrates management, encouragement of prevention and resolution of conflict through frank communication, speaks to management and employees about roles and responsibilities in creating and maintaining respectful workplaces, and helps identify the manager’s role...

There may be some opportunities for some cooperation here, but there are a couple things that we have to remember. Many of the buildings that Public Works and Services manages tend to be larger; schools, jails, office buildings; larger facilities that would require a different skill set than, say, a home, which the Housing Corp may be administering. I’m certainly willing to have that conversation with the Minister responsible for the Housing Corporation to see if there are any advantages, but it may not be as cut and dried as that. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, the lead on the Mackenzie Valley fibre optic link is actually the Department of Finance. We see ourselves as being a potential client. Right now, actually it was late in the life of the 16th Assembly, early in the life of the 17th Assembly, the department managed to obtain an agreement on a more formal and greater degree of bandwidth, which I think has helped a lot of the GNWT programs and services. Different departments have different requirements for bandwidth based on the programming they have in place. We have all heard about the challenges the health system is facing with...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will go to the deputy for some specifics, but just a reminder to committee that we deal with a huge range of contracts from small capital to larger capital to, sort of, more administrative contracts. So everyone would be slightly different. We’d use the same policies and procedures, but for specifics I’ll go to the deputy.

It may not be the best example because that is a leased building not an owned and operated building. If the property manager or the owner of the building were to come to us indicating that the power bills were going up, we would certainly deal with that through property management and talk to the department to get a sense of why the cost is so high. I think normally that’s how we would deal with that situation.

For owned and operated buildings we would have those discussions with the department. Many of our buildings have controls on them so that we can actually turn off lights at certain hours...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Member nailed it. That’s Stanton.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to confirm that the Government of the Northwest Territories’ new Reservist Leave Policy allows public service employees to take unpaid time off to serve with the Canada Reserve Force, part of the Canadian Forces.

The Canadian Reserve Force is made up of volunteers who serve with the Canadian military while maintaining civilian jobs or studies. Reservists have made substantial contributions to Canada’s domestic and international operations and the number of reservists in service has grown significantly across the country. The number of NWT reservists has increased...

I mean, I completely understand my colleague’s point about spreading the benefits and trying to be a leader. To some degree, I mean, we wait for where we know we can get supplied before we go in, because we’re not a supplier of pellets but we want to support the industry. We will go in where there is limited use of pellets, but at least some supply, and us being there, having additional demand, demonstrates that this technology works here in the Northwest Territories and that others can certainly build upon it. Example: We are putting biomass in some of the schools and some of the other places...