Michael Miltenberger

Madam Speaker, during December's power outage in the city of Yellowknife, it became apparent that communications from the Northwest Territories Power Corporation did not meet its customers’ expectations or its own standards. It is our goal to keep power outages to a minimum. The corporation has taken steps necessary to improve communication during both planned and unplanned power outages in the territory and will continue to do so.

This incident made it clear that we needed a more coordinated, timely and consistent approach to communicating power outages. We immediately updated our...

Madam Speaker, I would encourage the Member to share his good ideas as opposed to us doing what we think is appropriate and wait for Mr. Bromley to say whether we’ve got it right, in his opinion, or not. It’s a much tougher way and much more time-consuming way to do business. I would encourage the Member to share the specifics. We can arrange a meeting, if committee is interested, and we can make this as collaborative as we can. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. To use a phrase used in this House by you, we are looking to see if we can do things better. Clearly, we started back in 2007 or thereabouts with the Greenhouse Gas Strategy. We have worked our way through or are partway through the second iteration and we’re going to be looking at what improvements can be made to our work, to the significant investments that we make to the Ministerial Energy Coordinating Committee and to new initiatives, and how do we look at and measure what’s most effective in achieving the various goals. Thank you.

Madam Speaker, we are collating all the greenhouse gas savings that we can across the territory. Absolutely, Diavik deserves full credit. If the Member says they are valuable credits, if it’s political credit, absolutely. If they’re using them for some type of carbon trading credit, that’s totally their purview, but when we look at the success in the Northwest Territories, we can’t just look at government. We have a very significant private sector and industry, the diamond mines, and Diavik has, in fact, invested money. It’s saving millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases and it’s something that...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. After the number of years we’ve been in the House together, nothing the Member asks surprises me any further. Thank you.

---Laughter

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on a point of order today under clause 23(m) which states, “In debate, a Member will be called to order by the Speaker if the Member introduces any matter in debate that offends the practices and precedents of this Assembly.”

I’ve waited until today, Madam Speaker, to look at Hansard to make sure of the remarks. Yesterday during question period and I quote from page 18 of the unedited Hansard from Wednesday, February 12, 2014, “We’ve heard that deputy ministers will move money that is intended for human resources over to projects because they want to fulfil...

I would ask the Member to give one shred of evidence about pet projects, about the allegations he’s making. He says, why are we even here? We’re approving a $1.6 billion budget that provides services to every man, woman and child in the Northwest Territories. That’s why we’re here. We’re here to make laws that are going to benefit our people. We’re here to provide direction and oversight of a very complex organization.

The Member has some questions and concerns about positions. We have over 5,000 jobs. He’s talking about a few hundred vacancies, which we will lay out in detail as to where they...

The Member is making very harsh, unfounded allegations of criminal wrongdoing, which is what he said, and asking that people be fired on the basis of the fact that for the last three days we’ve been sorting through vacancy rate numbers and he’s now convinced that there is a criminal wrongdoing, which would mean, since the deputies all report to Ministers, that there was some type of complicity or conspiracy.

Very clearly, this Legislature votes positions, when they are part of the budget process, to fulfil functions in government. Once those positions are in place and they are staffed or in the...

I can appreciate the Member’s concern and his patience and his resolute pursuit of this issue along with his other colleagues from small communities. What I would suggest, since he’s referred to and looking for hope potentially, in his mind, with the review of vacancies that the committee asked yesterday for some more detailed information and we are in the process of finalizing that information. But once that information is reviewed and we all have a common understanding of the breakdown of the numbers, which I think will meet the concern of the Members, then we can have a more informed...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ll speak first, of course, to the fiscal reality that we face, which the Member is very conversant with and well aware of. I can also speak to the fact that there are health and safety issues for employees now. It’s no longer a case of one nurse or one RCMP, but it’s going to be two or maybe even three to cover off all of these health and safety issues, which gets back to being a significant cost factor.

We are trying to profile our resources to make sure that we provide coverage for health and social services and for the RCMP to provide that security and comfort to...