Tom Beaulieu

I think maybe I didn’t want to be misunderstood who we are… We’ll reach out to some of the key grocery stores, for sure, and then some of the other things will be expanded upon and we can reach out. But there’s always that fear that we will miss someone and that may become an issue.

What we’re asking for, if we made contact, is maybe to provide them for…because we would like to have regular contact beyond just the one contact, to let them know that the highway is going to close. But to try to set up a system where, if there’s going to be anticipation that the highway may close, maybe to provide...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The amount of kilometres is the way in which we will be budgeting the project. However, the project and the cost and the payments are based on the amount of embankment that is hauled by the project company. What we were anticipating is to haul 67 percent of the embankment on the construction of the Inuvik Tuk Highway at this point in time. However, we were able to haul just slightly over 60 percent of the embankment and that caused us to lapse the $4.8 million that is lapsed. We have a distance of about 55 kilometres to cover next construction season. We budgeted that...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Where it is possible to hang art in our new buildings, we will do that. We have been working with the NWT Arts Society. You are seeing some of the screens with the art on them at the airport here and in the main office building in Inuvik. So we’ll continue working with them to put what’s appropriate up in that new building.

That was a major complaint, as the Member indicates, when we were in Fort Liard. We are going to also be doing some dust suppression in the areas where they were considered to have the greatest amount of issues with dust on Highway No. 7.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The intention is as soon as possible to get the construction started again on that road. My understanding is that section was already awarded last year and it was not completed. It will be completed this year in addition to the other work that we are planning on under the Building Canada Plan. Thank you.

We can do that survey of people to find out if what we are offering is something they would be interested in. That would be the various things like working flexible hours, job sharing and so on. We do employee satisfaction surveys across our government, so it is something that we could perhaps add to the survey. The next survey that is coming up, perhaps we could ask those key questions about whether the employees think that accommodating them with this option is something that they would be interested in and get a feel for how many employees might want to job share or take a differed leave...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We do have a job share policy in the government. Currently, the boards and agencies and the departments are allowed to hire and put two persons into one position and they share the one job. That is currently allowed in our system. Thank you.

We will do everything we can to try to keep the traffic flowing on the highway, so if there is a list… It becomes a difficulty to try to anticipate when the road will be shut down. Last year we found that to be difficult to anticipate. But if there are fires near the highway, communications and Environment and Natural Resources will stay in touch with them. If we’re able to determine that we might have to shut the road down two days out, four days out, whatever, I will be prepared to accept a list from the Member and provide that to the departments, and the departments can touch base with...

We had recognized that it was the previous government that had tripled the budget from around $300,000 to just slightly over $1 million. We recognize that the budget is fully utilized and we are receiving applications well in excess of what money is available. We continue to have internal discussions in DOT to see if there’s a possibility internally to move some money around. So, we continue to have that discussion.

There are a lot of areas where there are pressures, of course. We have highways, we have marine services and airports and winter roads. So within those areas we are looking to see...

Those are real good ideas that I’m going to have a discussion with the deputy minister of Human Resources on.

One thing that was contemplated this year, it was interesting, it was brought up by another Member last year, and that was hiring students on a 0.7, 0.8 basis so that they have an opportunity to also work outside of their field of studies and maybe go into the private sector a bit and then give the private sector an opportunity to also attract the students. That was something that we looked at so that we would broaden out. If we were to hire all the students at 0.75 as opposed to the...