Michael Miltenberger

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d just like to point out initially that what was played in terms of my first comments this morning were from October 2008, followed at some point later by an interview with myself in Whitehorse. So that may have caused some of the concern for the Member for Great Slave.

The issue of board reform has been identified as a priority of the 16th Legislative Assembly. It has been worked on for over a decade. The social programs area was one that was determined to be, in our opinion, significantly over-governed with 70 boards for health and social services, education, and...

Mr. Speaker, the intent is to facilitate the things we’ve been talking about in this House with case planning, the ability to better coordinate the decision-making, to thin out the financial admin overhead in the governance, to put as much money possible at the program level recognizing that we are always going to be challenged with more needs than our resources. It’s for those reasons that we believe that this board reform will, if done right, improve how services are delivered at the community level. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are seven weeks left. I have asked them to lay out all the work that we’re going to conclude, the consultations that we’re going to try to undertake in the next seven weeks, taking into consideration as well that we’re going to be in this House until March 13th. We recognize very clearly going forward after April the next phase, once we decide on how we move forward, that there’s going to be more consultation required, probably broader consultation once we get things clarified in terms of general direction.

Mr. Speaker, there has been about a decade or so of work: Strength at Two Levels; the Cuff report; the Deloitte Touche report on governance, on boards; the work done by the Boards and Agencies committee; the recommendations for a whole host of different approaches to how we deliver services in the regions. We looked at all that. All that was there. It’s all documented. There are hundreds of thousands of dollars going back to the last century with the Minister of the time -- I believe it was Minister Ng -- started with a $400,000 report. Over the last 10 years I would suggest we probably spent...

Going forward from April those questions would have to be discussed. The whole issue of all the work done to cost out some of the Collective Agreement issues, pension issues, would have to be looked at. The discussion about the concept and if that’s not the right concept what is the plan, there are a number of significant issues that would have to be addressed going forward. April is just one of the first milestone dates. We had given ourselves to 2010-2011 to work through the planning, design, and implementation. After April we will be looking at those decisions and further consultations.

Mr. Speaker, I would suggest that the clientele for housing, education and health are very common. We have small communities where, for example, the predominant form of accommodation in the smaller communities is housing. We know -- I know from personal experience, having worked in Health and Social Services -- that when there are health issues or social service issues there tends to be a related housing issue. If there are troubles in school, if there’s not enough food on the table, if there’s alcohol abuse in the home, if there’s FASD, that these services link. Our intent was to be able to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Education has elected boards for the most part. The one exception I believe exists was the arrangements made in Fort Smith where the DEA patterned itself under the health board arrangement where there were two seats for the band, two for the Metis, and two for the general public. But for the most part education boards are elected and health boards are appointed. And the LHO boards, as well, I believe are appointed.

Mr. Speaker, this process was stretched out with a long timeline to 2010-11, recognizing that there was going to be a lot of work to get us from where we start to where we may end up with the issue of board reform. We are not precluding those types of discussions at this point. We took the first step to say, here’s a model we think has applicability and we have been doing the work to get us to April that will give all the information for us collectively to talk about and look at to decide on next steps. If it is not that model, not that approach, then what approach and if the broader...

We appreciate the work that every board member has contributed over the years, but we also recognize that we have a system that has evolved without a lot of planning over the years, often by program area, by ministry, and we have evolved now where we have 150 boards for 42,000 people for a whole host of different program areas. We have 70 in health and social services, housing, and education alone. We are of the opinion that there are ways to provide enhanced decision-making at the regional community level at the same time as rationalizing some of the board structures.

Mr. Speaker, I would just be restating or repeating the answer that I just gave to the Member. Clearly, April is a milestone date we have targeted to see where we go from here. The Tlicho model is a made-in-the-North model that we looked at and we think had applicability. Our initial concept was to move that forward and that is what we have done, recognizing and building in the milestone date of April. Thank you.