Tom Beaulieu

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.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. No, that’s not what we’re saying. Safety is still an important part of our work. We are not going to abandon all of the safety programs or anything we have in place for safety. That’s not what we’re saying. What we are saying is, if we develop hard rules saying that individual contractors have to have certain types of specific safety certifications in order to be on our jobsites today, then we will have eliminated the majority of people that are doing contracting in the Northwest Territories today.

So what we are doing is we are working with industry to roll out this...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am pleased to present the 2015-2016 Main Estimates for the Department of Public Works and Services. Overall, the department’s estimates propose an increase of $5.1 million, or 4.4 percent, over the 2014-2015 Main Estimates. These estimates continue to support the objectives of limiting expenditure growth in order to sustain the long-term sustainability of the fiscal framework.

Highlights of the proposed estimates include:

an interdepartmental transfer of $6.1 million associated with the consolidation of the government’s energy functions, along with associated...

The campaign has posters. We promote an inclusive workplace and we provide information to our employees. We have a GNWT Advisory Committee on Employability and the Employee and Family Assistance Program. We look at these. We try to promote as much as possible. We do encourage our managers to have discussions with individuals where we suspect that they are missing work due to mental illness and try to direct them in the right place so that they can receive some help. But there are a lot of privacy issues here as well. We have to be cognizant of privacy issues, so we work within that...