Glen Abernethy

I’ll go to the deputy minister as he’s got the information right in front of him.

We’ll go to Mr. Guy for some specifics on that and the criterion conditions.

The departments have been working together on trying to solve some of these issues and having some consistency across the government. The shared procurement services is obviously going to help a significant amount with the exact concerns that the Member and vendors in the public have brought forward. We do have a procurement procedures committee that has been put in place that has members from Public Works and Services, Finance, and other departments that are trying to come up with some of the challenges that are out there. There is also the comptroller general who is working on this as well...

Mr. Chair, we provide technical advice to departments on building status, building condition, which is part of figuring out what the deferred maintenance is and figuring out what work needs to be done on a regular basis.

But the priorities come from the departments themselves on what items are going to fall into the capital plan. Once an item is in the capital plan, there’s often a planning study that’s required. We participate in those planning studies, but the needs of the department come from the department in a sense, and then we help with operational plans and functional design and...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just have a clarification question. There are two things happening here. There was the ESA which was done originally, which was intended to identify the items in the building so that we could actually get a proper price and that people who were bidding on contracts for the teardown could be informed. Is the Member talking about that contract or is he talking about the contract that was awarded based on the information which… The first one, okay. To Mr. Guy, please.

Thanks, and I’ll go to the deputy for some more specifics, but at the end of the day we require our contractors to have a bond in place for their subcontractors and our contract is with the primary. The project that we’re getting is from the primary, and our dealings and our negotiations are with the primary. Their contracts are separate, independent legal documents between them and another party and it would be inappropriate for us to interfere with a separate legal contract between two other parties. We want to make sure that everybody is protected in the process. We make sure that the bonds...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The department administers contracts on a huge scale from small standing offer agreements, sole-sourced contracts for small amounts of money like $25,000, $30,000; $5,000 and up. We also do major builds such as the East Three School and the new office building in Yellowknife. We have change orders on a regular basis on any number of these types of things, these types of contracts.

In particular I can talk a little bit about the teardown for the school in Inuvik. We have a contract which is well within budget. There are going to be some change orders on that building. We...

Thank you, Madam Chair. We are committed as a government, not just as a department, to getting positions decentralized where appropriate, and in the Public Works and Services we did create one new position and we located it in Hay River.

With respect to the Sahtu and Public Works and Services, the Sahtu is actually administered out of our Inuvik office, and we do have employees in Public Works and Services in the Sahtu and we’ll continue to do that. As work increases, we may find that we’re in a position where we have to consider additional resources in the Sahtu, but right now the requirements...

Thank you, Madam Chair. With respect to the Member’s first question, we will put together a more plain-language explanation of what that is so that the Member and committee has a better understanding of what that is.

With respect to the large capital projects and the change from the main estimates to the revised estimates, I will go to the deputy minister, please.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Unfortunately, we go page by page, if the Member were to go a few pages in, he would see that we have done a reorganization within the department. Asset management has gone down, the positions in asset management have moved into the directorate. There is zero change at the bottom line of the department other than some forced growth as a result of salary, UNW levels, but we moved a number of positions that used to be in asset management into the directorate. The increases that the Member is talking about are a direct result of that move, not a change in a giant addition...