Robert C. McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have, to my left, Mr. Tom Williams, deputy minister, Municipal and Community Affairs. To my right I have Mr. Gary Schauerte, who is our director of corporate services, Municipal and Community Affairs. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, we do work closely with the Aboriginal governments. We have a website that’s up talking about unauthorized occupancy on Territorial lands. It’s actually a very good website and I would encourage folks out there to go on it. It’s on the Lands website. It talks about the 190 documented unauthorized occupants that have transferred to the GNWT. The bulk of them, again, are in and around the North Slave Yellowknife area. We have 167. We have one in the Sahtu. We have nine in Deh Cho and 13 in Fort Smith. The website actually is a very good source of information. It will answer a lot of...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is to provide communities with $1,000 to recognize the volunteers they have in the communities, have some kind of an event for them, and that, in turn, may encourage other people to volunteer. I think this is something that is long overdue. You get a small community that can access this money and honour the volunteers in the community and that might encourage other people to volunteer. So, I think there are some other benefits to this other than just giving the community $1,000. I think it will help. I believe it will help build volunteer capacity, especially in the...

We are in the process of putting some briefing material together. I think we’re seeking time with committee to give them a briefing on all the work that Lands has done up to date in kind of our first year of operation and then get some feedback from committee. There is information that the Member has asked for specifically. That would probably be a better venue to share that information with Members. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It’s in compensation and benefits within the School of Community Government.

I apologize if I’ve confused the Member. I was made to understand that we do the block land transfer within the city, like the hinterland would go through Lands. Dealing with city lots is still through MACA. So we would do the block land transfers and we do all Commissioner’s lands within municipal boundaries too. I apologize if I confused the Member. I just assumed that MACA took care of everything like it normally does. Thank you.

Thank you. It was a decentralization initiative. I think we’ve taken $100,000 to establish a two-year term position of master trainer that’s going to be located in Hay River. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I really couldn’t give the Member an answer at this time. We’ll do some research and we’ll come back to the Member and committee. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Member is correct; there was a formula funding review that was done. We had a committee of 15 with representatives from all large and small communities across the Northwest Territories. They put a lot of work into this and they came up with recommendations, and now the next step is to find the money. Being as challenged as we are fiscally, I mean, they recognized that and they were pretty understanding of that. But the work is done.

I’m not sure if we have a briefing. We have a briefing that we’re going to be providing to committee on the results of our findings. There...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I like the Member’s point that we have to view this as an opportunity to train a lot of Northerners to take advantage of some of these positions that are going to be open here at the Geomatics Centre, also with the fibre optic line and the possible satellite receiving station up in Inuvik. There are going to be many more opportunities there. I think there’s a huge opportunity here to work in partnership with Education, Aurora College, to ensure that some of our residents have a new field that they can possibly graduate into, because there will be a number of positions...