Tom Beaulieu

The negotiated amount is actually 15 days of sick leave per employee. Once they exceed not the 15 days but a certain amount of days, less than 15, I think it is nine days, the individual can be questioned by their supervisor as to why.

Determining the cost, I guess I don’t have that specific number with me; however, it would be very easy to determine the cost. We just have to track the sick leaves, as we have done, to determine how much the individuals are being paid who are taking the sick leave, do the arithmetic and we would come up with the number. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The government’s plan for any infrastructure is to replace infrastructure after 40 years, or 20 years after a major renovation, so the plan would be to replace the Moose Kerr School in 2019.

All of the departments do have occupational health and safety committees. They have regular meetings and they talk to the departments within the department heads and so on. If there is an issue where they think that individuals could be missing a lot of work, then they can’t really come out and ask individuals why they are missing work, so there is an offer that we have within the government that is an Employee and Family Assistance Program. Many people take advantage of that.

Last year, out of the public service, we had just slightly over 800 individuals access that program, so it could be...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The sick leave is monitored and tracked by the Department of Human Resources; however, specifically why the individual employees are on sick leave is not indicated. It’s a privacy matter and individuals have a union agreement that they are allowed a certain amount of sick leave. If they’re within that amount of sick leave that’s allocated within their employment agreement, then we don’t ask why. If they start to exceed that amount, then there’s more investigation with the employee and there could be discussions to determine exactly why an individual would be missing...

Right now we are using equipment that exists in the community. The hamlet grader actually is doing the work at the airport. We think that is going to be sufficient, but we’re going to evaluate that after this winter and see if there were any issues at all with the current equipment that’s in the community. If we find that the equipment is inadequate and that we’re not able to do the job and that there are any issues whatsoever with the airline companies, medevac, anything in there whatsoever, then we need to take a look at perhaps bringing more equipment in. The problem with the plow truck or...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We completed this Trout Lake Airport with Building Canada Plan funds. We had $7.2 million to build the road to the new airport and the apron, the airport itself and the new terminal building, but at the end we had expended all the money. We didn’t have enough money left in the budget to complete the $450,000 air terminal building, which is designed and ready to go but we didn’t have the money to do it. Thank you.

We are going to take a serious look at the possibility of adding more cycles. Although the industry didn’t support us to the full magnitude that they’ve assisted us in the past, we did get some money from industry. Actually, $140,000 to help us with some of the heavy traffic that they were hoping to bring over the winter roads. We’ve had a lot of complaints about the winter road from industry, people moving some fuel and so on into the communities, and from the general population and from the Sahtu, so we are actually seriously considering requesting some money for the winter road in the Sahtu...

Yes, Mr. Speaker, we do. At about five-year blocks we tender the winter road construction in several zones. We have seven zones and each zone could be divided up into two zones, or sometimes it’s just one zone. Then we determine right from Wrigley all the way to Colville Lake who would do what and we tender the work. We issue the work based on tender and a schedule that the contractor has to follow.

We are currently monitoring the situation and we will evaluate once the season is over and see if there are issues at all. As I indicated, if there are issues and we found the grader was inadequate, especially as the Member pointed out with the lighting, some danger with the lighting on this type of plow, we will look at that, and if we think there is no way we can continue with just a grader on the airport, we will look at the capital planning process to put in proper equipment.

As indicated, the entire project was over budget. Therefore, we do have to go back to get the money through the regular process. Our intention is to include this air terminal building in the next cycle of the capital planning process, which would be ’16-17.