Jane Groenewegen

Good afternoon, committee. I would like to call Committee of the Whole to order. We have a number of items before us on the agenda this afternoon. What is the wish of the committee today? Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you, colleagues.

“Jacob Ryan was born on October 2, 2008, at 3:45 a.m. The doctors said he was perfect but would never take his first breath. I was only 22 weeks into the pregnancy. His lungs were too underdeveloped, so it was a stillbirth. The hardest thing that I ever had to go through was to pass this little body to the nurse, knowing we would not leave the hospital with our son.”

I read this account that was written by a constituent and which precipitated the bringing forward of this motion today.

“I did my best to make it appear to others that everything was...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Hay River has a wonderful high school, which is not utilized to its maximum capacity, with very experienced teachers and a very wide variety of course options, so I would like to ask the Minister if he could report back to us what a survey of parents might indicate who, in the South Slave, in small communities, might be interested in accessing an education in Hay River.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I give notice that on Monday, October 28, 2013, I will move the following motion: Now therefore I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Yellowknife Centre, that the Legislative Assembly resolves to formally observe October 15th as a special day of awareness and remembrance for pregnancy and infant loss in the Northwest Territories. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, with the new health care facility in Hay River, I believe there are at least eight activities currently being carried on in the H.H. Williams Memorial Hospital which there has been no provision made for in the new health care facility. I could try to list them off, but maintenance, for example, has a large area within the hospital as it currently exists. I do not believe that maintenance has the kind of infrastructure at the new location that they had at the old location.

Has the Minister or would the Minister consider looking at those activities that have not been built into the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When I was asking last week about the plans surrounding the new health care facility in Hay River and plans for the existing hospital, I was informed by the Minister of Health and Social Services that, in fact, it is the Minister responsible for Public Works and Services who will be taking the lead on determining the potential useful value of the existing hospital. I would hope that we could do some kind of a technical review of that building sooner than later so that we aren’t scrambling at the last minute to decide what’s going to happen with that building. We are a...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Cyber-bullying is a “live issue” for students at all the schools visited by the committee, though it appears to be a bigger problem in the larger more urban settings. Students identified several websites that they consider to be problematic because the participants are anonymous: whisper.com (“but everybody talks about it”), Ask.fm and Omegle.com (including Omegle Canada). The latter involves live chats with strangers including video. Awareness of these sites and sites of this type should be part of ECE’s communication plan for students, parents and schools.

Students...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will take the opportunity to stand up as somebody who has been in this House for a long time and has heard a lot of exchanges, and has been known to spar and argue and fight with the best of them on the other side of the House, but, Mr. Speaker, I did find Mr. Hawkins’ comments, questions to Mr. Beaulieu yesterday to be offensive and it did, in my opinion, reduce the demeanor of our House.

Mr. Hawkins was asking Minister Beaulieu questions you really couldn’t answer, like can you do your job. Some of it is even what I would put in the context of asking him for an...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I guess I would just like assurance that before this facility would leave the hands and the submission of the GNWT under the Department of Public Works and Services that there would be ample time to entertain proposals for other sorts of things. I have suggested in the past perhaps even like NGOs that deal with certain types of social issues and things like that. I just don’t want to see us run out of time and go, oh no, here comes the wrecking ball, let’s tear the building down. I still think it has value. I’m a little biased.

Will the Minister assure me and assure the...

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the Minister if he would concur that there are different standards of types of buildings within the inventory of the GNWT and that probably hospitals are one of the more costly and more technical types of buildings. They’re more costly to build. If we were looking at a repurposing or re-profiling of this building and it were not for a hospital, for something else, does the Minister concur that the standards that might be applied to that evaluation would be considerably decreased? Thank you.