Robert C. McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Obviously, we feel badly for the events that took place in Whitehorse and we never want to see that in any units anyplace in the Northwest Territories. I have been giving the department direction to see about the policy to see what our standards are and see they can be enforced. I’m just in the process of gathering the information right now and until I have the information gathered, I’ll take the Member’s question as notice.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I believe the city was involved with this deal right from the beginning. In April 2010 they had applied to MACA for two parcels of land. One was one that they could turn over to Homes North, that Mr. Bromley references. There was a second parcel of land that they had kept for their own use. So we try working with the city as much as possible. We don’t get into direct competition with the city for the disposal of land because we would then become the seller of choice if we dealt directly with developers. The city was involved in the disposal of this property right from...

I will follow up with the other departments and see what we can come up with and see who’s responsible at the end of the day to report the findings to this House. I can assure the Member again that we are working with the communities to improve the quality of water and make sure all the water is treated regularly and sampled regularly. If it’s not sampled, we do try to work with the communities to ensure they get their samples out for testing for chemicals to the federal lab. Again, I will commit to the Member that I will follow up with my colleagues and we’ll find out who would be reporting...

As I said in my response before, communities are required to send annual testing samples to the federal lab. I’m assuming that most communities are doing this. There are probably a few where that needs to be picked up on a bit.

Like I said, we are working with the communities. It’s a lot of responsibility that the communities have now to ensure that there is safe drinking water. For the most part all communities are doing a pretty good job. I mean, we have to obviously monitor the situation, make sure the proper testing is done so residents feel that their water is of good quality. We’ll...

I will follow up on how this all played out. This deal has taken longer than anticipated. We had hoped that all parties would be able to get together. We thought it was a very straightforward land swap but, unfortunately, it’s taken two years. I will follow up on all the details of the situation and see how we can prevent this from happening again in the future.

We can dispose of the land and the developers can then work on trying to alleviate the lack of housing in the city, but I can commit to the Member that we thought this was a very simple land swap deal and it seems to have gone off the tracks a bit.

I will commit to the Member that I will follow up on this immediately and see if we can get this transfer done, because the developer had made an application to turn this into a subdivision and that’s all up in the air right now. I will commit to the Member that I will follow up on it and we will see what role MACA can play in trying to get this deal...

The communities do treat the water that comes through, for those with water treatment plants. They do treat the water. Travelling to all communities in the Northwest Territories and having drank the water in pretty well every community, I know the water quality is pretty good, because if it’s not good, then obviously we would have more pressing issues to deal with. So the testing is there, for the most part. There may have been some slippage in some parts, but we are working with the communities to try to rectify that. We have training programs for water plant operators that MACA runs through...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m not sure if there are missing test results. If there are no test results there, these may not have been done to begin with and that’s something we will work with the communities on.

There are four departments involved in this and we do try to work with the communities very closely to ensure that they do the testing. Under the terms of the water licence that they apply for, they do have to send a yearly sample to the federal government for the lab testing. If they fail to do that, then the environmental health officer would issue a boil water advisory; not because the...

I won’t make that commitment right now but what we do do is work with communities to try to ensure that they have first dibs on all Commissioner’s land within their municipalities. We’ve had applications come in from communities on Commissioner’s land within their boundaries and we try to work with the communities as much as we can to ensure that they are the beneficiaries of it. I will again commit to the Member that I as Minister will have a look at how this issue played out and ensure that we don’t run into any further problems when we’re disposing of Commissioner’s land within...

We have had some discussions with the five partner organizations. I’ve had an opportunity to meet with all of them. I’ve met with Sport North on a number of occasions and I’ve met with the Sport and Recreation Council. What we’re trying to do is iron out the whole situation here.

Our intent here is to take more of the politics out of the sport and get sport to the front line, on the ground to the people that most need it. I think we’re moving in that direction. We’ve seen a lot of good work done by all the partner organizations and I think in the last Arctic Winter Games in Grande Prairie we...