Kevin O'Reilly

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I move that this committee recommends that Elections NWT follow the same procurement practices as the Legislative Assembly and publicly disclose all contracts, the procurement process used for each contract, and the amount of each contract in the Elections NWT annual report. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I move that this committee recommends that the Elections and Plebiscites Act be amended to require a public body at request to provide the personal information held by that body. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Merci, Monsieur le President. It's tax time again. That's especially important for recipients of Income Assistance, who are required to file tax returns in order to remain eligible. Case officers keep an eye on what tax refunds their clients might be getting. Refunds are considered "unearned income" and the amount of a refund is deducted from the client's monthly amount of income support, even if part of the refund is used to pay off other tax debts. There is an especially cruel twist to this year, thanks to COVID and the federal Canada Emergency Response Benefit, or CERB. When CERB was...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Those of us who have been around for a while may remember when we used to have a languages bureau. It was quite an operation. There were probably 40, 50 staff there who were available and doing work in all of the official languages and developing curriculum, all kinds of great work. Unfortunately, we do not have that capacity anymore, or it's still there perhaps in different forms. However, that issue was raised with us as well as the need for better interpreter training and accreditation. That was raised to us in the written submissions, verbal submissions, and it was...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. What I'm trying to reconcile is: clearly corporate income tax is not a great way to try to finance a government, especially when it's bouncing up and down. Look at what was predicted main estimates in the current year, $25 million, and then we're only going to get $1.9 million in the current year? I know the pandemic and so on is going on, but this just doesn't seem to be a very reliable way to, or a completely unpredictable way to get revenues for the government. What is the Minister doing to try to stabilize the revenue side of the equation in some kind of predictable way...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I am not going to read what is on pages 10 and 11, but just to refresh Members' memory and for those who may be listening, there are some immediate changes that we can make. We have started to do some of this, where we try to make sure that we have interpretation available for the entire sitting day, that there are at least a couple of interpreters available; we are going to look at including statistics around use of official languages in the House in future annual reports from the Legislative Assembly, making sure that some of our basic documents are made available in all...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Now that I got all that nice stuff off my chest, I have a few tougher questions for the Minister of Finance. I'm looking at page 135, it's the revenue summary. When I look down at taxation, there is the listing for corporate income tax for 2021-2022 seems to be a negative $8.4 million. Does that mean we are shelling out $8.4 million, we're giving it back to corporations? What does this figure really mean? Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. The idea behind this motion is that we do need to have a policy moving forward that better recognizes and incorporates the use of all of the official languages in the way that we conduct our work and business here in the Assembly. There are a number of suggestions in the report itself, and I am not going to go over those, but it does involve things like making sure that we have backup interpreters on call and that there is basically a plan, step-wise, for improvement of the use of official languages across all of the work that we do here at the Legislative Assembly. I think...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I move that this committee recommends, should a situation arise in the future where interpretation is not available for a language being spoken in the Assembly, that the Speaker give strong consideration to a recess in or adjournment of proceedings until such a time as adequate interpretation can be provided. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Just very quickly: we do a lot of committee work behind the scenes here, and we take bills on the road and so on. Certainly, it was a practice in the last Assembly and I expect it's going to be the practice in this Assembly that whenever we go outside of Yellowknife, particularly to the smaller communities, we make it clear that anyone who wants to speak to committee can use any of the official languages. The one-week notice that we suggested here is just to make sure that we are prepared and can offer that service when we go outside of Yellowknife and even in Yellowknife...