Tom Beaulieu

Mahsi cho. We’ve been in contact with two major roadside assistance organizations, the Alberta Motor Association and Ford Roadside Assistance, and both organizations indicate that they cover all public winter roads in the Northwest Territories maintained by the GNWT.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. It’s a real pleasure for me today to introduce the leadership of Fort Resolution and some of the South Slave. In the gallery today with us is Chief Louis Balsillie, chief of Deninu Ku’e First Nation; president of the Fort Resolution Metis Council, Kara King; president of the Northwest Territory Metis Council, Garry Bailey. Also Don Balsillie, chief negotiator of the Akaitcho Territorial Government, is also in the gallery with them. They are some officials, and a well-known businessperson from Hay River that MLA Groenewegen spoke of, Brad Mapes; and also a couple of...

I would be pleased to copy the Members on that. I would probably have to get some detail from them. I don’t want to be writing to an organization that’s providing service when somebody else is responsible for providing that assistance, so if I can get some detail from the Member, I will include that in the note to the organization.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have been in contact with the roadside assistance organizations and they’re aware this is a public road. Both of those organizations indicated to us that they will provide roadside assistance, and if there are issues with roadside assistance and they provide us information, I would be pleased to pass that information, plus other companies that may be providing roadside assistance on the winter road, on to the Member.

All roadside assistance organizations are private and really have nothing to do with the GNWT, but we have contacted what we thought were the two major roadside assistance providers on the winter roads, those being the two I mentioned earlier. We have no issue contacting the organization that covers GMC or Chevy that provide roadside assistance in the same manner that we’ve contacted these organizations and have provided the concerns from the people of the Sahtu to them, and also people from Deh Cho.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. The winter roads maintained by the GNWT are considered public roads. Thank you.

On unfunded positions across the GNWT, there would be some positions that are unfunded and there are also vacant positions that are unfunded. We have been working with the departments, as the Department of Human Resources, to determine which positions in our system, whether they are filled by casual, contractor or indeterminate positions, which ones are funded and which ones are being carried by the department as an unfunded position. I don’t have that information here with me, but we are very close to gathering all that information now from all departments. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. That number is a fluid number. As of October 31, 2013, 35 positions were used between the departments and the agencies to cover other O and M requirements.

The department follows the positions. It’s a service department that provides a service to the departments in hiring, recruiting and retaining positions for the government. The departments make decisions on which ones to move forward with.

I’d like to give an example of positions. We have quite a few casuals for a variety of reasons. We have 208 casuals working as of October 31, 2013. For various reasons when we can’t sometimes fill the position because of the requirements, we aren’t able to find an individual that fits the requirements of that specific job title, but the job still has to be...

We looked at the dormant positions with most of these positions. As an example, when the position is covered off by a casual, it’s funded. When a position is covered off by a contractor, it’s funded. If there’s money to be moved from a position to O and M, it’s funded. We looked at the other category where we’re trying to staff. Those are funded positions, so we looked at the categories that were inactive, and we looked at the 161 inactive positions to see which one of those were not funded, and we’ve come up with the fact that 125 of those positions are not funded.