Robert C. McLeod

Obviously, I’m not going to make that commitment here on the floor, but I can assure the Member that I’ll have discussions with the officials, see where Jean Marie River is at, see what challenges they’re facing and if there’s any possibility of delaying. I’ll work with the Member and the officials to ensure that Jean Marie is in a good position to succeed once everything’s signed over to them.

Obviously, we’ll do our best to make sure that we don’t leave Jean Marie River on their own as far as the maintenance goes. We’ll work with the community to try to come up with – they usually work with our departments very closely – a maintenance plan, capital plan, and so forth.

Again, we need to make sure that our communities benefit from the transfer, if it means training opportunities for their local residents. There are some cases with some of the communities that have inherited the New Deal where they’ve kind of bundled together and hired maintenance people to make a tour of their...

Thank you. The Member is absolutely correct that when devolution does happen, it is something that we will inherit and we have to make sure that we’re best positioned to deal with all of the federal squatters on Crown lands. So we need to position ourselves to deal with that.

I will again commit to the Members that I will update them on any correspondence I have with DIAND as to our concerns with what we may be inheriting. Again, rest assured to Members that we will do our best to ensure that when we do take this over from the federal government, we will be in a position to be able to do the...

Mr. Speaker, I’ll try and stay away from lame answers and give the Member the answers that he wants to hear.

As far as I know, we didn’t GPS track the worker that was supposedly glued to his desk and not on site. So I’m not aware of that. I will follow up and find out how many site visits we actually have done. According to the Member we’ve done none but again, without a GPS strapped to our employee, we’re not sure if he’s gone out or not. So I will follow up on that for the Member. Thank you.

Thank you. Obviously, these are very important questions and ones that we need to address. Part of the consultation between now and when we get the final draft framework done, we need to make sure that we have all these questions answered, the ownership issues taken care of so as we go to implement the framework there’s not a lot of confusion. So we hope to clear up a lot of confusion before we actually get into implementation. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I said the report will be perfect. Whether it is acceptable to everybody is a different story.

I have committed and we have to have a look at this, obviously, and look at our budget issues and see if we are able to do it from within. If not, obviously, with our fiscal restraints, it will be something we will have to bring before this House to get approval. We will explore all options to see how we can best bring forward someone to enforce the new regulations. We will continue to work on that and I can commit to that. Thank you.

The discussion paper that we put out, we will consult with all affected stakeholders before we release the final drafting in June. The final draft is actually not the implementation, as the Member had noted. It would be a draft taken into consideration, all the comments that we have heard during the consultation process. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Anything can be resolved, and as I said, we have a discussion paper out. Interested stakeholders will have an opportunity to look at the discussion paper, give us their input, and then we would, by the middle of June, put out a final product, if it’s a good one, and if not, then we’ll continue to do the work until we have one that’s perfect. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m pleased to recognize our partners in Betty House that we have in the gallery with us today: Ms. Lyda Fuller from the YWCA, Ms. Dayle Hernblad from the Homelessness Coalition with the City of Yellowknife, and I think we also have sitting up there Ms. Kate Wilson, who has done a lot of work with YWCA.

Last but not least I’d like to recognize a gentleman that I’ve had an opportunity to work with for a number of years in my capacity as Minister of MACA: the mayor of Yellowknife, the outgoing mayor of Yellowknife, Mr. Gord Van Tighem. It’s been a pleasure working with you...

I’m unaware of any contribution program that’s already in place. It’s something that obviously if the groups come forward, we would be looking at it on a case-by-case basis. It’s not like we would be budgeting money every year to make contributions towards infrastructure. We would have to wait for the groups to approach us and then we would see if it fits within our budget before we decide on making any kind of contribution.