Rylund Johnson

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. I suspect  I would ask the Minister to also look at the capacity. I suspect the Office of the Fire Marshal is overworked. I suspect the GNWT capital budget requires them to review far too many plans and they could probably use some more staff, which I would fully support. And along that, perhaps a staff member could create some bulletins, some guidelines on the code interpretation. Right now, there are only three advisories on how the Office of the Fire Marshal will interpret the code. The last one was in 2016, Mr. Speaker. Despite the fact that the Office of the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Presently the Office of the Fire Marshal's industry guidelines set out that the Office of the Fire Marshal can't act in the capacity of an engineering or architectural consultant or else the plan review function would be in a conflict. This is a fair rule, but it seems the Office of the Fire Marshal has taken a very strict interpretation of this whereby they won't give anyone any advice on the interpretation they'll take of the building code. The default response seems to be, go hire a code consultant, which is often thousands of dollars, to a southern consulting firm...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When the Ombud Act was drafted, it appears the drafters went and took a schedule out of the Financial Administration Act, which sets out a number of public bodies. But for some reason, that doesn't include well, it doesn't include housing associations, which are not formed under the Societies Act. They're nonprofit societies that are agents to the Housing Corp.

I guess this is a larger problem, and I've asked the Housing Corp a number of times why we have housing associations and why we have housing authorities and the difference in the roles, and they've never been...

Thank you. As I've stated many times, every other jurisdiction in Canada has a Building Code Act. The work that our fire marshal is conducting is not inherent to the offices of fire marshals. Fire marshals are for training firefighters, for providing fire safety. They are not always code compliance officers. That usually lies with building inspectors under building code acts and those acts appeal to an independent body. Nunavut's Building Code Act, for example, has an advisory council made up of experts who hear building code appeals. In NWT, those go to the Minister, Mr. Speaker. I don't...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Another issue is presently the Office of the Fire Marshal has taken the position that they will not review any documents unless they are released for construction or final drawings. And the problem with this, Mr. Speaker, is that everyone else and along the process is the contractors GNWT has hired, the procurement we've lined up, all of our capital budget has worked together to get final construction documents. And then those documents are sent to the fire marshal, and it becomes this black hole before any work can start. And, Mr. Speaker, architects are willing to...

Mr. Speaker, the Office of the Fire Marshal, where dreams go to die. Whether you or the GNWT's building a health centre for your patients in Norman Wells or you're the North Slave Correctional Centre who built a beautiful healing room that the fire marshal won't let them use or you're an Indigenous government trying to open a remote lodge in your newly established protected area or you're simply a private business trying to sink your hardcapital to retrofit a building up to code, the Office of the Fire Marshall is sure to make your life difficult, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, we are the only...

Mr. Speaker, last week I wrote a Member's Statement for today on the importance of high quality childcare. But as the remains of 215 children were found by the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc First Nation at a former residential school site, I reconsidered my approach. We can't stand in this House and talk about high quality childcare and act like the legacy of residential schools does not impact this conversation.

Mr. Speaker, there is still mistrust in the school system in the NWT, and the institutionalization of childcare is not supported by all. I have often advocated for universal daycare as I see...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the discussion paper, the department points out a number of barriers. You know, I think a lot of them are monetary. Costs is simply subsidization. The infrastructure is the funding of money to build the infrastructure. But the report says we need between 221 to 299 trained educators in childcare. And then to me, this seems the biggest barrier we're facing is that I know many operators today can't hire qualified staff. I'm hoping to get a sense from the department how realistic, you know, even in the next five years or in this 2030 strategy getting that hundred...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'd like to thank the Department of Education, Culture, and Employment for reaching their discussion paper on early childcare and the great work they've been doing to date. I'm happy to see the funding for increasing education in that. But I think the big announcement is what's  the ambitious words coming out of the federal government, where they've been committed to having the cost of childcare. I know there's $30 billion federally over the next five years.

What I'm looking for from the Minister is do we have a sense of how much that money we will see in our bilateral...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Minister led into my last question, which is that a number of models exist for universal childcare. The cheapest model being essentially the day home model. But we ran into issues with that. In that, in some communities, it's just not ever going to be profitable to run a day home. And in some communities, you can't find a nonprofit willing to step up and run those programs. On the higher end of that spectrum is making those jobs government jobs where the GNWT would actually hire early childhood educators.

Do we have an idea what kind of model of universal...