Paul Delorey

Good afternoon, colleagues. Welcome back to the Chamber. Orders of the day. Item 2, Ministers’ statements. The honourable Premier, Michael McLeod.

Good afternoon, colleagues. Welcome back to the Chamber. Before we begin, colleagues, I’d like to draw your attention to the visitors’ gallery to a former Member, former Sergeant-at-Arms, former Minister, former Commissioner, and presently an honourary table officer, Tony Whitford is with us in the gallery.

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Accompanying Mr. Whitford today is Joe and Sophie Stockal from Wainwright, Alberta, friends for 45 years with Mr. Whitford. They were teachers in the late 1960s in Fort Smith and Inuvik, so Members may remember them from there.

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Welcome to the Assembly.

Colleagues, we’ll return to orders of the day. Item 17, motions. The honourable Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.

Colleagues, we’ll return to orders of the day. Item 17, motions. The honourable Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.

Good afternoon, colleagues. Welcome back to the Chamber. Welcome to all our guests in the Chamber today in the gallery.

Colleagues, on behalf of Members, I would like to congratulate Wendy Bisaro on being named the 2011 winner of the Ann MacLean Award for Outstanding Service by Women in Municipal Politics.

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The NWT Association for Communities nominated Wendy for this prestigious award. We are very pleased to see our friend and colleague honoured for her nearly two decades of outstanding service to her community. And, of course, she continues to serve Yellowknifers at the territorial...

Good afternoon, colleagues. Welcome back to the Chamber, colleagues, as we resume the sixth and next to last sitting of the 16th Legislative Assembly.

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Although this is a short sitting, I know there is a great deal of work that must be done before we adjourn next week and that you are eager to begin. However, I would like to take a few moments to acknowledge some special events in our Legislature since we last met.

I would like to comment on the recall notice which was originally issued on March 30, 2011, to reconvene the Sixth Session of the 16th Legislative Assembly in early April...

Good afternoon, colleagues. Welcome back to the Chamber. The honourable Premier, Mr. Roland.

Good afternoon, colleagues. Welcome back to the Chamber.

Before we begin I’d like to draw your attention to the gallery and the presence of a former Member and the first female Member of the Legislative Assembly. Lena Pedersen is with us.

Thank you. The Official Languages Commissioner will report to the Assembly, of course, but we can do that once we meet with the Languages Commissioner.

I might just mention that the budget for the Official Languages Commissioner used to be a lot higher but that office was very quiet for a lot of years and we have somebody now in that office that’s really wanting to promote official languages and her role in it. So when she requested the funding, we were more than happy to give her some more money to promote that office and we’d like to see the Languages Commissioner do a lot more with official...

We looked at her whole budget request and identified some areas where we thought that the request that she was wanting to initiate was maybe outside of her mandate, so some of the initiatives that she had -- and I don’t have a list of them right in front of me here -- the initiatives that she had proposed to want to take on, some of them fit clearly within her mandate, so that’s what we want to do, is help her out with the ones that are identified as fitting within her mandate and giving her the money to do it. We had lots of supports from Members that want to give her more money so that she...