Jane Groenewegen

Mr. Speaker, I would like to seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.

Unanimous consent granted.

Mr. Speaker, reductions and layoffs are never a pleasant experience. However, there are ways of mitigating the impact and making it at least professional, businesslike and somewhat humane.

I’ll give you another example of a situation where we’re going to reduce positions. There are four people in one shop, all doing basically the same activity. Now the government says they only want three people. So rather than going to the person in that shop who’s got 28 years’ experience and suggesting maybe coming up with some arrangement, like a normal employer would do.... Why would you send notification...

Mr. Speaker, I believe that this budget process has eroded public confidence. Unfortunately, people out there in the public don’t always differentiate between that side of the House and this side of the House. To them we are all the government. So I am feeling, as well, like we have been not fully brought into this whole process.

I did sit beside the Premier when we announced that we need to live within our means and we need to have affordable, sustainable government, and I believed in all that. But when it came down to the decisions on how we were going to attain that, then we weren’t part of...

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

I would like to see a budget that demonstrates it is premised on accurate fiscal information.

As a Regular Member, this is not my budget. The government has failed at every turn to communicate effectively. The budget cannot be redeemed by tinkering around the edges. The damage this budget will inflict is not repairable. Nobody takes a sledgehammer to their own house, because they know how much it will cost to rebuild it.

Mr. Speaker, today we heard the Finance Minister deliver his Budget Address. This address is a culmination of weeks of speculation and frustration on the part of the public, the potentially affected employees, their families and, yes, MLAs like myself.

I’ve been an MLA for 13 years. Even taking into account the changes in the budgeting process schedule in an election year, this path has been fraught with miscommunication, lack of consultation and missteps on the part of this government.

The business plan reviews we would normally conduct at standing committees in the fall instead turned into a...

On the same topic, when someone is applying for a job and they don’t feel they’re treated fairly, there’s an appeal process. When somebody’s in their job and they feel they’re not being treated fairly, there’s a union — an appeal — process. There’s a grievance process.

When somebody gets notification that they’re being laid off, and they’re a potentially affected employee because of reduction, there really is no recourse for them. Like, to whom do they appeal? They could go through the staff retention exercise. But you know, it doesn’t necessarily work out if it’s in a different community or if...

I had a situation in my constituency where someone received notification of being a potentially affected employee. Someone else in the same organization, with a similar skill set, doing a similar type of work, wanted to embark on voluntary separation, thinking that if he did that, the person who received notification for layoff would not have to go through that. The voluntary separation was denied, so it goes back to the person they want to remove. It makes you wonder about the motive. Was this really entirely a job reduction for saving money, or was this some kind of a housecleaning exercise...

It’s my pleasure today to recognize our relatively newly elected mayor of Hay River, His Worship Marc Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Premier did not identify who is signing these documents on behalf of the G.N.W.T., and he doesn’t seem too familiar with what they are, anyway.

Anyway, Mr. Speaker, in case I don’t get a chance to ask any more questions, I want to let the record show that today, February 21, 2008, I sat in this Chamber and said that this process has not done justice to due diligence and to the people of the Northwest Territories. It has put them at undue risk.

My question for the Premier here today is: will he endeavour to find out…? We’re going to leave here now, but I want to know...

Mr. Speaker, now that we have established that, in fact, the G.N.W.T. is bearing some of the risks — if something goes wrong, all of the risk — for this project, I’d like to ask the Premier — and he’s the Finance Minister, so he should know this — how is this liability being reflected in the records of the G.N.W.T.? Because as everyone knows, we have a legislated debt limit of $500 million.