Tom Beaulieu

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...

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...

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.

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.

We don’t anticipate any issues with getting everything that we need into the Sahtu communities with the current state of the winter roads. What we would like to do is, really, use this year where we recognize that we didn’t get industry support as a bit of a prototype year on what happened, what occurred and so on. Then next year look at what we think we need, how we need additional cycles and so on in the Sahtu. By additional cycles I mean the extra grading that’s going to be required on the snowfalls in the Sahtu. Thank you.

We do a best guesstimate we can to determine how many times the passes would be needed by the equipment on the winter road. We also have a lot of historical data, and we use those recognizing that, of course, in the past we’ve also had some support from industry that is no longer there.

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.