Robert C. McLeod

Mr. Speaker, we are still in the process of determining how we are going to procure those particular contracts. There has been no decision made yet. We look at all the information we get. Again I say, if we get two or more letters for a negotiated contract, one of them may have the Member’s support, one may not. How do we determine? The thing is, the contractors now all have the ability. Again, it goes back to policy. The purpose of the policy is to allow those contractors that are just starting up, trying to get their foot in the door, an opportunity to do so. If they prove that they are able...

Mr. Chairman, we expect to have our LHOs to collect 90 percent of assessments. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Member is correct; there is a $40,000 cap. We’ve had three applications, I think, that we’re looking at right now for this year. We had the one from last year.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The 135 to 137 units that the Member spoke of, we’re looking at August 31st by having all those off our hands. A lot of them will be approved HELP clients, which wouldn’t be really a burden on the NWT Housing Corporation.

The Member is right; a lot of these units have been empty for the last few years. We’ve had to maintain the units and look after the operational costs of the units, because we’ve been putting them down so quick and we’re having trouble finding approved clients for it. We’re quite confident this year that we have 82 clients, we think, are just in the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the Members for the comments. We do appreciate the comments we got on the money that we’re putting into the youth. We all agree it’s an investment in our future, and the Members of the 16th Legislative Assembly should be proud of the fact that as an Assembly we put more money into youth than I think has ever gone into investing in them before. I think we should all take responsibility for that.

I feel the Members’ talk about the capacity in the communities is challenged and capacity issues in the community. Obviously we recognize that and in working with LGANT...

With the after school physical activity program, we do work very closely with Health and Social Services, ECE, and our program is fully subscribed to. We have a list of all the schools in the Territories that are accessing some of the funding and some of the programs that they’re offering. So we work very closely with our sister departments to ensure that we’re fairly well coordinated. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, the Member is asking me why I haven’t brought a negotiated contract forward to Cabinet. I have brought requests forward. It was last year. He didn’t say where it was. If he meant in his particular riding, then I haven’t brought anything forward. I would make recommendations to Cabinet on whether to proceed with the negotiated contract or not. We are following policy and the policy states quite clearly that a negotiated contract is to help the local contractor build capacity so they can compete in an open market. I follow these things quite closely and I have enough confidence in...

Mr. Chairman, we will work with the LHOs to come up with a deficit recovery plan and there are a number of things that some of the supports that we work with the LHO. We do an analysis of their LHO operations and where they can see some savings and that. We work quite closely with the LHO, because it is not our intent to have our LHOs in a deficit situation all of the time and not being able to provide service we expect of them. Thank you.

I see that is where this $300,000 could be used for all the proper training. We recognize the fact that we have a lot of people in our small communities that do this type of work, and they volunteered to do this type of work and we want to do our part to ensure that a lot of these folks are adequately trained to take on a lot of this work. I mean, I think the Member and I have both seen firsthand a number of cases where folks have gone through the ice, and even when they do call off the official search, it’s always the local people that have the knowledge and the ability to continue searching...

We geared our programs and the amount of dollars that were allocated to each program. A lot of that was based on the money we were getting from the federal government and because that money is not there, then obviously we’ll have to pull back a bit and go back to our historical figures. We use the CARE, the home repair, for example. Because of the investment the federal government has made, we’ve been able to add resource into that particular program. Now that the investment is done, it’s sunsetted, then we go back to our historical figures and we feel that we’ve been able to make some gains...