Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I move that we report progress.

---Carried

I just wanted to find out, Mr. Chairman, what time is it now.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Not to be unkind where there are other parks, but we are the southern part of the Northwest Territories and obviously have, usually, the weather on our side for the greatest amount of time. I don’t need to compare it to the campground in Inuvik, for example. Geographically, we do have a few things going for us in the South Slave. One of them is a longer warm season for those parks, the three parks that Mr. McLeod refers to. I would ask the Minister if he would undertake to get a costing for us on what it would cost to expand that into the shoulder seasons a little bit...

Mr. Speaker, as I said, we’ve had an unusually nice fall this fall, the nice warm weather. As a matter of fact, I think there isn’t any snow in Hay River today, and even going a little further south towards the border, I think it’s been 10 and 12 and even 15 degrees recently. Mr. Speaker, the reason that the Minister gives that the program for the facilities there cannot be expanded because of limited resources, what is it that does not allow or precludes the GNWT, ITI, from just leaving the gates to those facilities open so that people can enjoy them whether they are staffed or not? Thank you...

Sorry, and I apologize, Mr. Speaker. I am very encouraged to hear this. This is something that I believe has been missing in the government for a long time. SFA is another area where you could combine different appeals for different departments under one person and they could expeditiously deal with these matters. I don’t envy that person’s job, mind you, because it might necessarily involve saying no to some people. But does the Minister concur that in the scope of these policies that there are extenuating circumstances from time to time which do require a common sense solution which often...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to follow up on the questions asked by my colleague Mr. Bromley on how we can take a more common sense approach to things which seem to have an obvious and simple answer, but because policy is strict and there isn’t a lot of latitude for discretion to be applied it makes it difficult to plead these cases.

The cases that Mr. Bromley refers to where we have students in southern Canada who need medical attention and because medical travel must originate in the Northwest Territories to be covered, the fact that these students couldn’t then access any kind of travel...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The committee would like to continue with Tabled 66-16(5), NWT Capital Estimates 2011-2012, and proceed with the Department of Transportation. Thank you.

That is encouraging and I’ll be very interested in seeing how the Minister plans to address that. I’ll be looking forward to some proposal being brought forward.

The Minister referred to these kinds of situations landing on her desk. I would question whether or not, considering the number of portfolios, the amount of workload that the Minister and her executive assistant carry, the fact that the Department of Health and Social Services is the largest department in our government, if this is the highest and best use of the Minister’s time for her to take on that role herself. Is it not possible...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to also talk about the draft agreement-in-principle for devolution and resource revenue sharing that has been achieved between the federal government negotiators and the GNWT negotiators.

As long as I have been a Member of this House, the Regular Members, and maybe even the Cabinet Ministers, have literally ground on whoever the leader was to advance the agenda of the Northwest Territories when it comes to resource revenue sharing and devolution. We told Joe Handley that he should be like Ghandi and walk to Ottawa to make a statement how we should have northern...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Would the Minister consider grandfathering people who already have a longstanding, established relationship with a specialist in the south?

Also, can the Minister confirm that the neurologist who is currently located in Yellowknife, does that specialist have a full patient load or do they have capacity to take on more patients?