Michael Miltenberger

Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the Member’s comments in his closing statement about working to serve the residents the best we can. As we sit here today with our capital budget, we are of course making the case that SAM cash management module and the SAM strategic sourcing and supplier contract management module will in fact help us do a better job at our part of managing the affairs of the government. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We’ve initiated discussions through the initiative of trying to increase the population by 2,000 in the next five years with industry, the mines, in particular the Chamber of Mines plus the Chamber of Commerce, to look at how we minimize the fly-in/fly-out population and look at what opportunities are there as they come up with an expedited immigrant application process, which is going to come into play here in the new year.

We’ve also done a lot of work internally as a department to move to fill our very new vacancies we have both inside and outside of Yellowknife. We...

Yes, Madam Chair.

At this point, not that I’m aware of.

It’s a hypothetical situation posed by the Member, but we have very clear processes as an employer on how we deal with affected employees. We will use those procedures and policies to the full extent to ensure, should there be, if there is, maybe, that that eventuality occurs, we will ensure that every step is made to address the issues raised by the Member.

Thank you. This project, of course, is funded $200 million by the federal government, $100 million by ourselves. The Government of the Northwest Territories, we’ve got that funding flow starting to work.

In response to the Member’s question, it’s not an advance. It’s going to be from money spent for work done that we are of the opinion of having had one year under our belt and seeing the work that was done by the contractor, got through the start-up issues, got the equipment going, got the staff online, local staff, got all the processes and procedures figured out that this year they will be...

Mr. Speaker, I want to take this opportunity to update Members and the public on our fiscal situation and discuss the ways we are addressing our challenges during the remaining life of this Assembly.

To date, 2014-15 has included a number of fiscal challenges. The most severe fire season in NWT history has cost $55 million, or 3 percent of this year’s budget. A record 64-year low water levels at Snare Hydro required the government to intervene with a $20 million contribution to the NWT Power Corporation to ensure higher electricity costs of 13 percent are not passed on to NWT residents and...

Mr. Chair, I understand that we just intend to do general comments today, so I had not arranged to have any witnesses to be brought in. Thank you.

We are as transparent as possible. We, of course, are interested in being more transparent if that’s possible. We would be more than happy to have discussions with the Member and with committee about what improvements could be made.

I would also just like to touch on some additional information that I didn’t touch on before. There were also payroll audits done, payroll tax audit. Two major payroll tax collectors, and there were two done in Hay River, 23 additional payroll audits are planned, five in Yellowknife, 12 in Hay River, six in Inuvik. The current status is one of the major collectors...

The additional net adjustments for tobacco audits was $378,000, and the additional net adjustments for petroleum products was $2.360 million.