Tom Beaulieu

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I give notice that on Monday, March 9, 2015, I will move that Bill 49, An Act to Amend the Deh Cho Bridge Act, be read for the first time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. This is a process. If we were to introduce, say, an association of some sort and say that all contractors must be certified under this system as of today, we would be eliminating the majority of our contractors in the small communities. We would be eliminating the majority of our contractors in the NWT, period.

We need to work with the contractors. We need to move into this process. Eventually we do hope to have everyone covered under some sort of certification indicating that they do have safety certification to be on any job site, but how we introduce that does take...

On a semi-annual basis, the Department of Human Resources prints out the vacancy rates in the GNWT. Inside those vacancy rates we break it down by department. We then work with the departments on vacancy rates, not only in the regional centres and the small communities but also in Yellowknife. So there’s a plan and a strategy to fill those vacancies.

As I indicated earlier in the House, there’s been a considerable drop of about 180 vacancies between the last two printings, which are about six months apart. We’re trying to maintain that pace. The strategy essentially is once the report is out...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The majority of those increases are forced growth: $838,000 funding for new electrical rate increase by NWT Power Corp, $1.2 million in funding for a new YK office building, the Norman Wells Health Centre, the Hay River Health Centre and the new trade shops in Fort Smith and Fort Simpson. So when all of those are online the next fiscal year, we’re going to start to see that we’re going to need that money for the utilities.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The indigenous Aboriginal women in all of management constitutes about 12 percent of all managers in senior management in the GNWT, and for senior managers it’s 8 percent, and for other management, middle management it’s at about 14 percent. Of course, the Aboriginal Development Program also includes women. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So, the Public Works and Services capital, if that’s what the Member is referring to as opposed to capital in general, we handle a lot of the construction for most of the departments. If the Member is looking for just carry-overs on PWS projects, we can probably provide that information.

Climate change, yes, we agree that did have some impact on the shipping this year. Water levels were extremely low and could possibly be attributed to that. We try to get our product in very early. Generally as soon as the waterways are ready for shipping, we try to get our product in...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The procurement shared services is a process that I described previously. We received a lot of positive comments from the decentralized tender desk, the regional desk. We intend to continue to monitor the procurement shared services. We believe that we have increased the quality of tendering. We work with all of the departments. We will be doing internal audits on the procurement shared services so that if there is anything that we think we could improve on in this type of procurement, we will do it.

The occupational health and safety, I will have the deputy minister...

We are going to have some detail on that for the Member. I just want to give the deputy minister an opportunity to get some of the details here. We usually follow a process ourselves. Public Works is usually pretty up to date on their own warehousing needs and office needs, so I’m sure that if it’s a building that, as the Member indicates, is well over 20 years old, that we have it in the queue for possible replacement or a major retrofit, but we don’t have the details with us, unfortunately, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have had discussions internally on how the Sahtu region operates in as far as Public Works and Services goes. We would strongly look at placing an area manager into the region. We have other areas where the activity has not been as high as other bigger regions and we have placed area managers into these other areas. An example is Deh Cho. We’ve placed an area manager in Simpson who actually reports to the regional office from the South Slave; however, it becomes quite independent. This is what the Member wants to see, that the Sahtu region become more independent...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To my immediate right is Paul Guy, deputy minister of Public Works and Services. To my immediate left is Steve Lewis, director of corporate services; and to my far right, Laurie Gault, director of Technology Service Centre.