Kevin O'Reilly

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Okay, I'll try to go at this a different way. Is there a plan or a strategy for the use of these funds? Have research priorities been identified? I'm just wondering why we're not spending more of the money in a given year, why we're surplussing money. Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Merci, monsieur le President. Glad to hear the Minister say that we're going to start being a little bit tougher with our negotiations so that we can retain more of the benefits here for Northerners.

One way to perhaps help that: can the Minister commit to having a thorough and independent review of our socio-economic agreements conducted so we can learn from others and our own mistakes, and will he agree to make such a review public? Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. The bottom line in this contributions is for the NWT Chamber of Mines; is that core funding that is provided to the chamber? Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the commitment by the Minister, and just so that he understands, I'm glad that the department is getting ready and they're responding to a growing tourism industry here. That's a good thing. I just want to understand a little bit better about what exactly this position is going to do. I'll give you an example. I was over at the Frontier Visitors Centre a week and a half ago; I was there for about 45 minutes, they had, like, five staff on. Probably 50 people came through the doors and were buying things. The place was crazy, quite frankly. So those people are...

I can assure the Minister that all those agreements are there, but most of them are unsigned, most of them are undated. I had to go to secondary sources to try to actually find out when they signed, like, news releases and so on. In any event, I look forward to having them all there.

As I raised in my statement earlier today, there are few, if any, legally binding commitments in the current socio-economic agreements. Can the Minister confirm these agreements are really best-efforts arrangements with few, if any, specific binding commitments with penalties and sanctions for non-compliance?

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Are the companies actually putting any money into these agreements, or is it just us expending money on the agreements? Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Maybe I'm just a little bit thicker today, but then can the Minister tell me what this position actually does? Do they regulate operators in some way? What exactly does this position do? Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. I would like to recognize Colleen Wellborn. She is a constituent of mine, and thank you for joining us in the House today. Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Can the Minister tell me where it was moved to? Thank you.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I understand the study is probably going to be available in a matter of weeks, so I really look forward to talking to the Minister again about what additional support we can provide for the centre, but in his opening remarks he talked a lot about the new initiatives that the department's doing. One of them was $132,000 for a full-time tourism development officer position for the North Slave Region. Can the Minister just explain a little bit more about what this position is going to do and whether that individual is going to be in a position to offer support to the visitor...