Michael McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, now that life is starting to get back to normal for the residents of Aklavik and Inuvik in the wake of the flooding and subsequent evacuation of Aklavik, I would like to take this opportunity to commend the many people and organizations who worked so hard to respond positively to this flood and evacuation.

On May 26th, an ice jam on the Mackenzie River resulted in water levels rising in the community of Aklavik so that many sections of the community were under water. Aklavik’s Emergency Response Committee responded quickly and efficiently by organizing the...

Mr. Chairman, the conveyor system is very complicated and requires technical people to operate it. It has 16 independent conveyors which lead to the main conveyor belt. The cost associated with operating has been fairly large. We recognize that. We had anticipated initially to recover a good portion of this from CATSA. The amount of $222,000 is something we have been discussing with CATSA in terms of them compensating a portion of it. Our ask on this was $150,000. They have taken the approach that they will only fund $22,000 of it. This is based on their application of national policy. I...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks to the Minister for that. Again, I am not a big fan of negotiated contracts. I think that does delay a lot of projects, but I can understand the government making a commitment and trying to accommodate organizations and aboriginal groups and negotiate contracts and, to me, not being able to agree on a price will delay projects. Has this always been a problem historically and was there this much of a problem when most contracts were publicly tendered? Thank you.

Madam Chair, the season was, in some communities, Wekweeti especially was pretty well basically the same as what we had historically. Gameti and Wekweeti of course usually have a shorter season than other communities anyway, but this year we had problems constructing the road to the community because of the warm weather and it didn’t change the fact that we still had to have equipment out there for the whole period, because we started constructing the roads the same time as we start construction. Every year we start in January if we had our equipment out there and we had the contractor in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the intent of the program, from my understanding, was to help with a lot of single students going to school. The Minister was up in Inuvik with us attending the convocation of Aurora College. I think he noticed that there was a lot of graduates there who were raising families. Is the size of families and the extra support they have to pay factored into the figures the department comes up with? That’s why I say we need to have another review. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my questions today are for the Honourable Charles Dent, Minister of Education, and it’s to do with the student financial assistance. I’d like to ask the Minister how the department comes up with the figures for student financial assistance, because a student that’s going to school in Montreal or Toronto, Edmonton, would get the same amount as a student going to school in Yellowknife or Inuvik. So I’d like to ask him how they come up with the figures and are these reviewed every year? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it’s important to be very clear that MACA does not hire any bylaw officers. Bylaw officers are hired by the community governments, and that’s the case in the communities of Tsiigehtchic and Aklavik. The community of Behchoko decided that they no longer needed the service or could not afford the service. I’m not sure what the situation is. We are reviewing, again, the budgets for the communities and several communities have indicated that maybe the community government budgets are not sufficient anymore. We are looking at that. It would allow them to set...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a quick question for Mr. Roland. You continue to say that the minimum code requirements will get you two to four years more out of the building. Now, is that set in stone? I mean, do the renovations, are they not going to be code in two or three years? Is it possible that the life of the building could be extended a little longer? Because I thought when you brought something up to code, you got longer use out of the building. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I believe we have seven bylaw officers in the various communities across the Northwest Territories. We just did an evaluation on the situation, whether they have been making a difference or are they being effective in terms of community protection, and most of the communities have responded very favourably. We are at the same time, through our New Deal initiative, doing an evaluation of our O and M money, the operations and maintenance money that’s provided to the communities for community governance. We’re also reviewing the water and sewer subsidy, along...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There is a lot of new money that is flowing into the communities. Up to now the money that was earmarked for dust control was part of the formula that was calculated for community governments. The community had to set dust control as a priority. Since we have new funding this coming fiscal year, we have the community capacity fund that can be used for dust control, the gas tax, the definition in the agreement allows for greater flexibility, there’s allowance for this money to be used for chipseal or dust control. So there’s a lot of different things. There’s also the...