Tom Beaulieu

We have training sessions with the employees on disclosure. We have a Harassment-Free and Respectful Workplace Policy that clarifies personal harassment within the GNWT and the public service. We are trying to let individuals know that if they do disclosure in any of those areas that I spoke of, it would be a safe disclosure.

The only thing we could come up with on why there has been so little uptake is people actually don’t feel safe disclosing with the public service, with their supervisors, management and so on. I too get a lot of calls where I indicate to the people that this is an...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was fortunate to read the letter that was written by one of the members from the Sahtu, indicating how bad the road was and so on. We had not anticipated that the roads were that bad. We thought they would be improving.

When the Member and I drove on it, it was very early and it was rough, but the department considered that it would be improving. We recognize that we do need more money to continue to improve the winter road and that we need more money for watering and more grading cycles to be able to smooth out that road.

At this time we have a contract in place and...

I can’t commit to having the contractors that are hauling contractors attend such a meeting, but what I can commit to is that as they continue to do their reports and giving us good indications of the driving conditions of the road that we will take those reports into consideration during the preconstruction meeting. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, as our government continues to work towards achieving its goal of an environmentally sustainable and prosperous Northwest Territories, I would like to highlight one of the ways that the Department of Public Works and Services is helping to ensure that we maximize investments to improve the operational performance of our existing infrastructure.

First established in 2007, the Capital Asset Retrofit Fund (CARF) Program was created to target energy efficiency investments in our public buildings. At its core, the program strives to:

reduce energy consumption and operational costs of...

I think that when the department proceeded with bringing the extra monitors in, monitoring traffic and monitoring other traffic on the winter road in the Sahtu, we were doing that for safety reasons. Recognizing that on our trip into the Sahtu on the winter road, the road being rough is also a safety issue. I will go back to the department, and the department seemed very responsive when I first discussed it with them. So I will go back to the department to see if there can be money freed up somewhere within our O and M budget to maybe do some more work on that winter road in the Sahtu. Thank...

Yes, we can provide that letter to both Members for Hay River. Thank you.

The letter was sent to the Minister responsible for Fisheries and Oceans. He is the Minister responsible for dredging. I don’t recall all the cc’s, but I believe we sent a copy to the Minister of Transportation and the Minister of Public Works. Public Works Canada were the last people to put any money into dredging back in 2012, at the end of the fiscal year. That’s when the last $60,000 was spent on the dredging program in Hay River. It was essentially pointing to the issue at Hay River. There was some issue with barging and getting in and out of the port in Hay River. Thank you.

Thank you. The department’s opinion is that we would look at the value of it and if we think that we can do retrospective analysis fairly efficiently and not at a great cost to the government, we will do the analysis. The Member is right; we have not started on that, but if we make a determination that we think it is a valuable piece of information that will help us in the future and not just being done to show what has happened but something that has been done so we can learn from it, then we will do that analysis. Thank you.

I’m just looking at what is currently happening on the bridge. There are a few things that have to be completed on the bridge and that’s from the original contract still today. After that, we are going to look at the analysis, a retrospective analysis that was committed in the House by the Minister of Transportation, and we will seriously look at that commitment.

As soon as the work is completed, which should be any time now, I will talk to the department and we will see about looking at starting the retrospective analysis.

I will commit to having preconstruction meetings once the contractors for the winter road are selected next year in the Sahtu.