Tom Beaulieu

Like I said, we do get 700 to 800 applicants to our summer students. We hire around 300. We’re on target to do that again. We tried to do a fairly even split between Yellowknife, where the majority of the public service is, and out there in the regions and the communities. We do have 100 or so competitions at one time because we can’t run all the vacancies at one time. All the positions to recruit, we cannot run them all at one time. They’re at varying stages. Some of them may be at the offer stage, some are at the appeals stage, some are just becoming vacant and so on, so there is a constant...

The Member is correct; our fines are very low. So this is the reason we are increasing them, more than doubling them from what we have of $115 to $280. Also, in addition to that, we are going to step up the advertising and campaign of making people aware of how dangerous it is to do distracted driving. We know figures show in reality, distracted driving is more dangerous than impaired driving. We are going to have to be as severe with distracted driving as we are with impaired driving. Thank you.

Maybe I’ll try to provide some context to this. What the selection committee looks at is the physical workplace, working atmosphere, social, health, financial, family, benefits, vacation, time off, employee communications, performance management, training and skills development and community involvement. Some of the companies that are on this list that have been selected as top employers are companies such as CIBC, City of Edmonton, Coca-Cola Canada, Ikea, Ontario Public Service, Shell Canada, Telus, Xerox, KMG, LLP. There are a lot of companies there. I don’t think that it takes a whole lot...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In 2012 we had 177 convictions; in 2013, 223 convictions; and to the end of March 2014 we’ve had 54 convictions. Thank you.

Thank you. The resurfacing of that highway is, unfortunately, not in the information I have here, but my understanding was that we were continuing the work, other than all other work that needed to be done other than this widening of the highway, using that money from Corridors for Canada. I will check to see what is happening between Tsiigehtchic and Wrangling River and I’ll let the Member know. Thank you.

Thank you. Yes, we are. It’s essentially the same plan that we’ve been running for seven years. It is a plan that’s worth $4 million a year for the last seven years that has been spent and we thought that it would just roll into this new Corridors for Canada III. However, there seems to be a one-year gap in between. We were hoping that didn’t exist, but yes, we will be continuing to widen the road moving forward with money that comes from the federal government. Thank you.

The Inuvik-Tuk highway is a design build highway. We are heavily involved in working with the joint venture up there, the EGT Northwind and in the construction of that highway. We think it’s a good approach. It’s a good approach for the Inuvik-Tuk highway. We would look at all of our procurement avenues when we build any major infrastructure like this.

At this time it would be unwise, I think, to say that we would go and negotiate a contract on that section of highway. We recognize that that highway will be running through two different regions. About 100 kilometres will be through the Deh Cho...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We do this in a couple of ways. For communities that are under the petroleum products division where we are providing fuel, we only charge to the individuals the cost of the fuel plus a commission plus the transportation of the fuel. In situations where we have, in the middle of winter, a sharp increase like we had seen last February, we use the Stabilization Fund that we use to run the PPD as a division to make sure that we keep the prices stable until after the winter season, and we use up some of that Stabilization Fund in order to do that.

The department does buy all fuel at wholesale. We do try to look for the best wholesale price. Having said that, I am not able to answer the Member’s question. I don’t have the information of what our anticipated fuel costs would be going into the future.

What we do is we have the trends that we recognize that fuel goes up and down on a daily basis and then slowly inching upward, but we recognize that the wholesale purchase this year compared to the wholesale purchase last year was substantially higher this year. Therefore, there were increases of up to 19 cents, 20 cents on a litre of gasoline...

As the Member indicated, there was a competition held. We had offered the position to an individual who was in another community. The individual had requested a desire to remain in their community. We had looked at the numbers to see if something was possible for the individual to remain in the community. Initial numbers we had looked at indicate that the position would be best to remain in Hay River. Thank you.