Robert C. McLeod

Thank you, Madam Chair. The forced growth funding, community government operations and maintenance funding went up by $1.37 million; water and sewer funding operations, $1.2 million; water and sewer funding classification, $413,000; grants in lieu of property taxes, $223,000; Collective Agreement increases, year one and two, $338,000; Property Tax Revenue Grant Program, $119,000.

We appreciate the Member pointing out some of the shortcomings of the communities across the Northwest Territories, and how we’re the only jurisdiction in the country that doesn’t have one. We’re a more stable jurisdiction with a lot of the people that are not moving about so often. In the bigger jurisdictions they all have the ability to just go down the street and, for the most part, find somebody to inspect.

Once we get some research done, I will commit to sharing it with the Members and, again, if there is input that the Members want to put into this, then we’d welcome that also.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are many opportunities for those that provide service to youth to come together on an informal basis and have discussions on how to improve the programs for youth. In the previous Assembly, I think the Premier at the time had a Premier’s forum with the youth and had a lot of providers there, a lot of youth workers, a lot of youth that were there. It was well attended, and the suggestions that came out of this forum for the age of the kids that took part in this forum were unbelievable. They did an excellent job. I mean, there are always opportunities for youth...

One of the things we’re working on is updating the Highway Emergency Alerting Protocol. As far as the interim measures go, I mean, I mentioned before that we’re trying to get some first responder training so we have some folks that are able to respond. We’re looking at different types of equipment they might need.

As far as implementing an interim service, that’s a huge undertaking, and I think we’d have to, as a department, have a look at that. We’d have to do our due diligence on that because it is going to be a huge undertaking. Even though it would be just an interim measure, there’s a lot...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m assuming the Member’s talking about the buildings that the community governments put up? Residences too? Well, as far as the residences go, I mean, if they’re built by the NWT Housing Corp, obviously we would inspect each one of the buildings that we put up. As far as the community buildings go, I believe the assistant fire marshal would check to make sure all the codes are met, and again, depending on who designed the building, I think there are times when there are site visits made by the building designer. The architects that design the building, I think they...

Thank you. I appreciate all the Members supporting their colleague. It shows up in the regional office. So it wouldn’t show up in the headquarters. It shows up in the regional office. Thank you.

The members of the working group are the Department of Health and Social Services, Department of Justice, Transportation, Municipal and Community Affairs.

We have the fire marshal and the assistant fire marshals that cover each region.

Thank you. I’m not sure about the report. We’ll do some digging around and see if we can find the report. We continue to work with the community governments on their water treatment plants to make sure that they’re adequately funded to operate these water treatment plants. So we’ll continue to do that work. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The federal money that was available as free money, as the Member likes to call it, we’ve taken it up pretty well every year. For some reason it wasn’t available to us last year. Every year since its inception, I think we have taken our share of it.