Katrina Nokleby

Strongly in favour.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thank you to my colleague. I had written in the chat that I did want to speak to this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I have spent the time since I left Yellowknife late Thursday evening dealing with numerous uncountable emails and messages and phone calls from people who have been evacuating and leaving the North. Many of these people are Indigenous. They have been reaching out to me. And in my time spent since this has started, I have become aware that there were no conversations with Indigenous governments ahead of all of this evacuation. No opportunity for Indigenous...

In favour.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I also want to thank the interpreters, but I also want to apologize to them. I know that I am one of the ones that's all a repeat offender for speaking too quickly in the House, and I know they all bear with me and I appreciate it. I also want to thank the staff and advisors for our work; it's been a tough one scheduling the Regular Members with all of our interests and wants and they work really hard. And as well the pages, because they're always fun to have and I haven't looked once to see my water glass at a low state. And of course my constituency assistant Maggie...

Thank you. I promise I'll keep it brief. I just wanted to say that it's exciting to me as an engineer, a professional engineer, to see this bill coming into the department that makes a lot more sense for it to reside in. The Department of Infrastructure probably, I think it's fair to say, contains most of the engineers that work for the Government of the Northwest Territories. I do know also that in the past, the government itself did not necessarily register their engineers as they did not see them in the role of actual work of engineering. However, over the last several years and decades...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I literally have people telling me they were asked to submit new forms at the beginning of this week so I'm not sure what's going on here. And I do appreciate the Minister needs to look into this. Can the Minister tell us is this also affecting the seniors' payments? I know that sitting here a couple of my colleagues have also indicated to me they've had people reaching out they have not received their money this week. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister of ECE. As I've been sitting here this morning, I've been getting messages from residents that people on income assistance being with payments for disabilities have not received their payment yet this week. It's my understanding there's been changes to the process and the form submissions, etcetera, and that has delayed the payment. Can the Minister speak to what is going on? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you. Mr. Speaker, June is National Indigenous History Month. Throughout the month Canadians will be acknowledging Indigenous Peoples, First Nations, the Inuit, and the Metis.

As settlers, my ancestors were welcomed to these lands by Indigenous people. They were taught how to survive and how to navigate through the untouched regions of what we now call the provinces and territories of Canada. They built relationships with nations and shared with each other the teachings, knowledge, and skills of their cultures in an effort to form community. However, there is a dark side the true...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I do appreciate that this could just be a oneoff but given that I'm hearing from my colleagues they are also getting emails of the same, I think this is a glitch or something is happening in the payment system. Can the Minister commit to ensuring that that money for those people is in their bank accounts by the end of the business day today? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'm glad to hear that, and I do appreciate that the Minister is responsive. However, it's my understanding that this delay has been caused by changes to the disability payment and as such, people were submitting documents early this week. And so my question is why would we make changes that are then being done right before the next payment as people don't have their money in their accounts as of Friday and that makes me worry that children aren't going to have food, rents aren't going to be paid. You know, I can survive if I don't have money in my bank account; I have...