Jane Groenewegen

What happens sometimes is the LHO makes a decision within the policy guidelines, the constituent is unhappy, they go to their MLA, their MLA goes to the Minister, and then from the Minister’s office goes a decree of some kind to address the situation one way or the other. It can be demoralizing or demeaning to the authority who has been given the decision-making mandate to then have the Minister dictate down to them. I would rather see a policy in place where the people of the LHO can appeal either to the Minister or president or somebody so that request comes from them when they see an...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are back to the budget session, the longest session, the longest sitting of the year for MLAs. Of course the budget is still under lock and key so we can’t talk about any specifics, although we have certainly had some part in consulting with the government on what it contains in it, and we can talk about a budget in general terms.

Mr. Speaker, we have extensive resources but we also have considerable challenges. How do we measure the well-being of our Territory? It is usually through landscape glimpses, through statistics, which can report good news or bad news. It is...

Some of the areas that I know, from having been an MLA for a long time, which come up are issues around residency, emergency shelter issues, issues of rental arrears and perhaps very, very old outstanding arrears for damages, situations where a senior may be in a home, in a subsidized housing unit and they temporarily need someone to stay with them who may be working but they need their support and care in the home for some reason. Those are the kinds of things that are real life kind of human issues, and yet I don’t want people to feel that they have to go through a big appeals process, that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister responsible for the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation and the local housing authority.

Mr. Speaker, we all know that we need policies. We have to set policies so that the good folks who work in our local housing authorities have guidelines by which to go, and the boards who also serve as volunteers in our communities. They have guidelines by which to deliver the housing programs. But, Mr. Speaker, sometimes the situation arises which calls for some kind of discretionary decision making, which I encourage. I think we should...

I just want to be absolutely clear that as Members we are all about accountability, policy and process. I just want to make it absolutely clear that my comments or questions today in no way are meant to be disparaging toward the good work of the front-line workers and the LHOs and also to the people at the headquarters in the Housing Corporation and the hard work that they do. I just want to be very clear that this is just something about just making it work a little better. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It takes resources to build the ice bridge every year and to maintain that bridge. I’d like to ask the Minister of Transportation who pays for the building of that ice bridge and the maintaining of it over the winter months. Thank you.

Yeah, a bridge would be helpful. I’m not too sure, thinking back to whether or not there was always political agreement about whether such a bridge would impact the residents of the Hay River Reserve in a way that they wanted at the time. So I’d like to ask, when was the last time that question was posed to the people of Hay River and the K'atlodeeche First Nation? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. For as long as I’ve been in Hay River, and I’m sure for many years before I got there, there have been very strong ties between what was called the Hay River Reserve, the K’atlodeeche First Nation and the town of Hay River. These two communities are located on the east and west sides of the Hay River. Mr. Speaker, there has never been a permanent link between these two communities and when there is no ice road in the wintertime, it requires the residents to travel many miles, clock many miles to travel back and forth between these communities. People from across, as we...

So what would it take to get such a bridge back onto the agenda? I guess if you’re saying it’s not a piece of GNWT infrastructure, obviously it’s not something that the taxpayers of the two communities could take on. What options are there open to investigate further the idea of building this link between these two communities with traditional and very longstanding ties to each other? Thank you.

And the costing was done.

---Interjection