Michael McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My officials assure me that we have negotiated very aggressively and we have a good deal with CATSA. We had initially indicated and our position was to have all of our costs recovered. There was some work done at the airport in 2003, which was funded 100 percent. In this case, a lot of the work that was done inside the building required us to give up some of our space in the terminal building. It also required an addition to the facility, which would take up some of the aircraft parking and it also would require us to provide some new space for parking that we are...

Mr. Chairman, I don’t have the specific date, but I think it’s around December 2003, that we got notification that there would be a requirement to put in a screening device for passengers and baggage. The date was set for January 1, 2006. Having said that, we had no information in terms of the scoping of the project, the costing of the project and who would be required to cover which portions until early this summer, Mr. Chairman, which didn’t leave us a lot of time or much room other than to go forward with a special warrant. The timing, as I stated earlier, is January 1, 2006. It doesn’t...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, we have been working with a stakeholder group for some time over the last while to assess the passenger terminal facility here in Yellowknife, and we had plans to look at this facility and to make assessments on the passenger terminal building and the CATSA requirements. We had talked with program staff, air carriers and CATSA technical staff. Initially we had looked at long-term plans and had confirmed that we would be looking at development on the west side of the airport, however, as I indicated earlier in my response, the notification came last...

Mr. Chairman, the Member is right; we did sign a five-year agreement with a company here in Yellowknife to provide food and beverage services, and I’m not aware of the fact that we did indicate to them that we will no longer be using a restaurant, because we haven’t made that decision yet. Right now we are in the process of doing a retail concession study along with a customer satisfaction survey, and we are doing a cost assessment as part of the request for proposals. So we have not decided at this point that we will not have a restaurant. We are more in a situation where we will be making...

Sorry, Mr. Chairman, I'll have to ask you to repeat the question.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. That question of what can we do for our youth is a very difficult one. It’s been raised here in the House on a number of occasions during this session and it’s something that we are very concerned about. First of all, we have to get our own programs and our own infrastructure requirements and programs for infrastructure in order. We are attempting to do that by cataloguing what other departments are doing. We are looking at our programs. We are reviewing them to see if they are adequate. We are meeting with other departments in terms of social program Ministers...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the youth portfolio, as the Members know, is fairly new. We have a number of programs that we operate currently. First of all, we have the Youth Corps Program, for which we budgeted $750,000 and we targeted that funding towards youth at risk and also some of the educational programs. We also have some funding towards youth contributions.

In the last while, we’ve been quite focused on where we intend to go in the future with this whole portfolio. We are doing a review of what is in the other departments. We’re cataloguing all the programs that youth can...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we have a lot of information to review. We’ve had conferences all over in the Territories in this past year. We’ve had conferences in the Sahtu, we’ve had conferences in the Deh Cho and the South Slave regions. We have a report that’s coming forward to us with regard to the review of our Youth Corps funding and that is being put together as we speak. I’m expecting those recommendations for my consideration in the next little while and I’d be glad to share that information with the Member, Mr. Speaker, as soon as I receive it.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as I indicated earlier in my responses, we are reviewing our programs in terms of how effective they are and our dollars are being spent and utilized accordingly. We are also coordinating, as a department, an interdepartmental youth program, which meets with other departments twice annually to share information to see what we are doing and what other departments are doing. As part of that, we’ll be looking at what the requirements are for youth, as I stated earlier. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, today I am pleased to provide Members with an update on the recent appointment of Mr. Jim Antoine as the pan-northern ambassador for the 2007 Canada Winter Games that will take place from February 24 to March 10, 2007 in Whitehorse, Yukon.

---Applause

2007 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Canada Winter Games. Nearly 4,000 athletes, coaches and officials and many thousands of other spectators and media from every part of Canada will travel to Whitehorse to experience the North during the games.

With the announcement of Mr. Antoine as the pan-northern...