Sandy Lee

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, my questions are also to the Minister of Finance and it is not in regard to an item before the Committee of the Whole, but in regard to the budget for 2004-05 which has passed. It is in regard to the money for TTC. Madam Speaker, it is only yesterday, I believe, I finally figured out that the money that this Assembly had voted on, as Mr. Braden had stated, $2.4 million was in fact not spent. It was last November that the government started looking at the possibility of moving this. My general question is how do we as MLAs have any confidence that...

Yes, sorry, Mr. Chairman, I should clarify. I am embarrassed to admit this, but I think it finally clued in that we might not have a workshop in Yellowknife. Is that true? If that is the case, how would Yellowknife people put their input into this process? Thank you.

Madam Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to finish my statement.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t have the capacity to get into the mind of the Minister, so I can’t prove or disprove whether his recollection is correct or not. I am a member of committee and I do not recall that. I can only go by what I have in my mind. Even the documents we received from the Minister in our in baskets, the briefing note about the potential assessment on the move was dated November 24, 2004. That would have been after our business planning process. That probably would have been when Dene K’onia was being suggested for closure. I don’t know what happened before November as...

Mr. Chairman, the general public out there have already heard about this and they are inquiring of us about details. How are the people who might want to take part in this able to find out this information? It is not an unlimited amount of money. It is a good chunk of money, but not money that could be spread thin and wide and forever. Could the Minister indicate as to what he can tell the NGOs or parties and people who might be interested in taking part in this and what they should be doing to get involved in that? Thank you.

We vote in this House, giving the authority to Ministers to spend the money as they requested. There was money approved to renovate this building and if the department chooses not to do that, that's a change in the scope of the work.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t have general comments on the opening statement, but I do have some questions on the proposed expenditure to prepare for the Mackenzie gas project of $1.3 million for the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs and $378,000 for the Department of Health and Social Services. Certainly this is something that many individuals and groups across the Territories have been asking for the government to do. I know the government has been trying to get the federal government to perhaps take over a bigger burden of it and the GNWT has been left with no choice but to...

I don’t think I got confirmation as to whether this is supposed to be non-profit. I think Minister Roland indicated that it’s supposed to be self-sustaining. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if there are too many groups out there without making any money. I am assuming somebody will make some money. They should make some money on this. I am being told that they will be required to pay some of these fees back. We don’t want to see a situation where they would be overburdened by having to make these payments. I guess at this point we don’t have any idea how it’s going to work once it...

Could the Minister confirm whether this was supposed to be a non-profit operation? I think that is what has been the plan. We expect that the non-profit community organizations would bid for these projects and run them. Now the Minister is indicating that the government will buy this equipment. I don’t know how long these contracts are. If somebody gets to do this work for two or three years, what happens to the equipment after that? If they are self-sustaining after the program gets off the ground, are they expected to pay towards the equipment and, if not, the equipment should stay as...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. My apologies for repeating what seemed like the same question and perhaps lacking originality, but sometimes there is a need for that in this House and you have demonstrated that very well in the last session when we were talking about issues that were pertaining to other matters.

I’d like to ask the Minister, with all due respect, the Minister is not the expert on programming and neither is anybody around this table. I’d like to know, and I’d like to be assured, and I think I have the right to know on behalf of those children who are going to be affected that those...