Kevin O'Reilly

Merci, Monsieur le President. I want to assure the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment that I was not dozing off, and he did have my attention when he announced the minimum-wage increase today. However, I want to ask him: I raised this issue about the Minimum Wage Committee in a previous Member's statement. I think he received some kind of report. Is he willing to make that report public? Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.

I appreciate the Minister's short answer yes there. That was great. The Minister obviously knows exploration and development in the range of the Bathurst caribou herd is probably at an all-time low since the 1980s as a result of the pandemic. Now would seem to be a great time to finally develop and implement mobile caribou conservation measures that would provide temporary habitat protection, so can the Minister tell us about the status of the promised mobile caribou conservation measures and when we can expect to see them finally implemented?

Thanks, Madam Chair. I am sure the Minister is being rather facetious, but seriously, I want to know what kind of public engagement Cabinet would intend to do before making such a change. Are you going to give people a reasonable amount of notice? Thirty, 60 days? Are you going to publish the proposed change in newspapers, on a website somewhere, allow for comments to be submitted? Will there be a summary of those comments, and then some reasons for why the change is going to be made or not? That's the kind of reasonable approach that I would expect.

Let's cut the humour here, and let's get...

Merci, Monsieur le President. Earlier today, I discussed how predator-control measures for the Bathurst caribou herd were ineffective and the lack of progress on habitat protection while the Slave Geological Province road continues to steamroll right along. Can the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources tell us what specific actions have been undertaken in the last year to protect key habitat for the Bathurst caribou herd? Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.

Thanks, Madam Chair. I just would like to thank my colleagues that serve on the committee and the City of Yellowknife that made a written submission. This was an interesting issue that we had to deal with. GNWT was worried about incurring liability for winter roads that were being built off of our roads. We were told that this was an easy fix. We started to deal with this, actually, in the last Assembly. We didn't get to it, so it came back again into this Assembly. Although I thought it was supposed to be an easy fix, that's not the kind of bill we actually ended up with. We ended up with a...

Thanks, Madam Chair. Yes. I appreciate it, and I did look at the materials that the Minister had used for her dialogue. I think the tax stuff in it was just a couple of slides, so a fuller version of an options paper would be much more helpful. Is that something the Minister could do? Thanks, Madam Chair.

Thanks, Madam Chair. I take it from what the Minister said that there are not going to be any efforts to look at replacing the revenues in some way. How is the Minister going to apply this concept of tax fairness across the other kinds of taxes that we have to pay? Look, I heard the Minister characterize taxes as "burdens" earlier on. Taxes are actually the price of civilization. Governments don't run without taxes or some source of revenue, so how is the Minister going to apply this concept of fairness across other parts of the tax system? Thanks, Madam Chair.

Thanks, Madam Chair. I take it from what the Minister said that this is really about tax fairness, being competitive, and so on. That's all good. Can the Minister tell me how much revenue the GNWT is going to lose as a result of this reduction? Thanks, Madam Chair.

Merci, Monsieur le President. I want to thank the Minister for that. I'm looking actually at the Department of Finance website. The number of individuals that have accessed the Wage Top-Up program as of March 10th is 2,360, not the 1,000 that the Minister just kind of mentioned, 96 participating businesses. Look, this is a very significant portion of our workforce.

They're going to see their wages drop in one day. It's just not fair, Mr. Speaker. I've tried a number of different avenues here to try to get the Minister to recognize this is a real problem and issue. What other solutions does the...

I want to thank the Minister for that response, but all we have is the Minister's statement and news release about on what basis the Minister made this very important decision. Can the Minister not at least talk about what the recommendations were from the committee and share those recommendations with the public?