Wendy Bisaro
Statements in Debates
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, am going to stand and vote in favour of this motion. As stated by my colleagues, it’s quite straightforward. This is asking for an updating of an act which is very much out of date. It’s asking for changes that will allow us to provide better services to our residents. It will allow us as residents to feel a bit more involved to allow us to do sort of the social service aspect of our lives, if we wish to do it, which we certainly can’t do now.
The whereases in the motion talk about specific areas in the current act which are out of date and which need to be...
Mr. Speaker, thanks to the Minister. I guess I would like to suggest that if we are following a system that we have set up that perhaps is not working very well, then maybe we ought to look at other jurisdictions in a little more detail and perhaps change our system.
In our system, in our process and in these guidelines that staff has, does it identify a standard turnaround time and what that time is from the time the application comes in to when the renewed or new card goes back out to the individual? Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, thanks to the Minister for the answer. I would like to know then, if it is a manual process and I’m a worker in Inuvik and I’m processing these applications, do I have a template? Do I have standards, guidelines that I follow so that Mr. Moses sitting next to me is actually doing the same work in the same way that I am doing? Thank you.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I move that we report progress.
---Carried
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have to recognize a couple of Frame Lake constituents, one of whom Mr. Bromley is trying to steal. Welcome to Ms. Suzette Montreuil; welcome to Mr. George Lessard. I’d like to welcome all the dignitaries who are here today in the House and if there are my constituents behind me who I can’t see, I’d like to officially welcome them as well. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s hard to speak to this motion and bring something new to the debate, but speak I will and present my views and those of my constituents on this historic Devolution Agreement and this historic motion that’s before us today.
Some months ago I was highly critical of the path taken by the government following the signing of the consensus agreement. I did not, and still do not, believe that non-Aboriginal residents had adequate opportunity to provide input into the final Devolution Agreement and the impending implementation.
I still believe, although not all my...
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise today to speak to the Auditor General of Canada’s report on the Northwest Territories income security programs.
This audit identified systemic problems in the Department of Education, Culture and Employment in their delivery of core programs: Income Assistance, Student Financial Assistance, the Senior Home Heating Subsidy, and the Child Care User Subsidy. A majority of files reviewed by the auditors did not comply with key legal and policy requirements for these four programs, 90 percent of the files in the case of income assistance. The Auditor General’s staff...
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I move that this committee recommends that the Minister of Finance provide the committee with the final public accounts immediately upon sign-off, with the understanding that the committee may conduct a public review before the document is tabled in the Legislative Assembly.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Again, this is an issue that the standing committee felt was extremely important. This is something which the Information and Privacy Commissioner has been recommending for many years, and from what we understand, the department has started to do some work on looking at access to information and protection of privacy legislation that would include municipalities. We urge them to speed it up. This motion, again, identifies that this is a very serious issue which the committee feels very strongly about.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and my colleagues. I appreciate the opportunity to make a few brief remarks.
I think it’s important that we recognize the committee felt very strongly that the Health Information Act is a very necessary piece of legislation in the era of electronic medical records. Because of the Information and Privacy Commissioner’s very strong recommendation that we needed this kind of legislation to cover privacy around health records, the committee felt it was important to bring this motion forward, and I just wanted to emphasize the importance of this. We have heard previously from...