Jane Groenewegen

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The sessional statement is the first time we’ve had a bit of chance to hear what the Premier’s vision is for the territory -- and the Cabinet’s vision, I would assume -- since Mr. Roland’s election as our new Premier for the 16th Assembly. I can’t help but be struck by the consistency with this statement starting off, as now being here for the fourth term, as the similarities that we come across from term to term to term. I guess one of the things that I would like to see…We’ve all come here to do a job and we want to make a difference and we talk about those...

Mr. Speaker, my point is that if we take care of the minor things, the major retrofit will be less of a challenge. Would the Minister of Public Works and Services commit to forming a working group between perhaps the MLAs, the local school authority, somebody from Education, to take a look at this facility and see what kinds of things that we could identify that we could do now while we’re waiting to get a major retrofit done? Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I know a little bit about building maintenance and let me tell you, some of the pictures in the review there, there is a penetration through the wall in the boiler room where pipes and where holes are that haven’t been filled and there’s nothing in the hole anymore. It’s just a breach of the firewall in the boiler room. Surely for the price of drywall and something to seal around a pipe we could do a little preventative maintenance, fill that in, so if there was a fire in the boiler room it wouldn’t spread to the whole school and burn it down. Those are the kind...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to continue to ask some more questions about the Diamond Jenness Secondary School in Hay River. Maybe this time I’ll direct my questions to the Minister responsible for Public Works. We have a lot of capital infrastructure as a government and there’s kind of an alarming trend I’m seeing here which I don’t like. When we have a building, we are the stewards of that building. We are required, like any homeowner or anybody who owns anything, to maintain that. Now, if we’re not going to be tearing down the Diamond Jenness Secondary School and we’re going to be...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, what I want to hear today is that this school is a priority on this government’s agenda. That is what I want to hear today: a priority. Now, I know there is a lot of competition for capital projects, but we have had an increase in our ability to borrow money. It has gone to $500 million now, I think. I would suggest that this is important enough that if there are competing projects, the government should borrow money to fix this problem as opposed to letting it languish. But in the meantime, will the Minister commit that the things that can be...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, this technical review that I am making reference to with respect to the Diamond Jenness Secondary School in Hay River was completed in August 2006. Might I compliment the Department of Public Works and Services for actually a very comprehensive and thorough review of the school. However, I don’t know what has been done with this information since. There aren’t too many pieces of infrastructure or buildings that would be allowed to go into this state of disrepair. There are health issues. There are safety issues. There are code issues. This is a...

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We are going to save our questions until after our comments, so we have a cast of thousands of questions over here. Just kidding. That is what we decided to do. I am not sure if Members have any questions or not. There is one question I do have. I would just like to ask the Premier -- I probably should have asked this on the day you ran for Premier and not today; it is a bit late now -- I hope there is going to be a real culture of working together. You talk about change. There is one thing that is very quickly within our ability as 19 Members to change here. I...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The wish of the committee today is to deal with the sessional statement in Committee of the Whole today. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

…abandoned light fixtures. Let’s take them down. That is not big ticket stuff. Can we maintain the school, at least?