Wendy Bisaro

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I move that this committee recommends that the Department of Education, Culture and Employment work closely with the Standing Committee on Government Operations to revise and bring forward its legislative proposal for amendments to the Official Languages Act in the life of this Assembly;

And further, if the department has received any legal opinions related to the issue of federal concurrence with changes to the NWT’s Official Languages Act, this information should be shared in confidence with the Standing Committee on Government Operations, so that the department and the...

Thanks to the Minister for considering that. That’s great. I appreciate that commitment.

One of the things in the fall MACA update, there was a little blurb on municipal access to information and protection of privacy legislation, and that was my initial reason for asking some questions. It states in the MACA fall update that it is expected that this report will be completed during the life of the 17th Assembly. In the response yesterday, the Minister said that they’re working on it, they’re talking to senior staff at communities, but I didn’t really get a sense of when the report is going to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. About two months ago I had the opportunity to attend a sport forum sponsored by the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs. It was a gathering of representatives of recreation and sport organization partners from across the NWT with the MACA Minister and staff. It was billed as a meeting to seek input from the sport and recreation sector, input being sought to advise both the 18th Assembly and MACA on priorities and plans for the future of sport and recreation in the NWT.

There were representatives from each of the hardworking territorial organizations that manage...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to just talk a little bit about this motion. Members had spoken about it a bit this week. In doing this review of the Official Languages Act, the committee found it quite difficult to get a handle on just where the department is in terms of what it’s doing with regard to official languages.

We noted the Minister had made references to an official languages strategy I think four years ago, but could find no evidence that an official languages strategy had ever been put forward or tabled.

The other thing that was of great concern to committee is the very comprehensive...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We wish to deal with Committee Report 14-17(5), Standing Committee on Government Operations Report on the 2014 Review of the Official Languages Act. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have some questions today for the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs. I want to thank the Minister at the outset for the response to my oral question which he tabled yesterday, read into Hansard yesterday.

It doesn’t go all the way to answering some of the questions that I wanted to ask him last month, so I want to ask a few more.

One of the recommendations from the Information and Privacy Commissioner, in regards to access to information and protection of privacy legislation for municipalities, was that the government ought to consider a phased-in approach to...

Thanks, Madam Chair. This report had one motion, but it had a number of recommended actions. I just wanted to mention a couple of the recommended actions and some of the discussion that happened at committee in the development of this report on this bill.

First of all, there was quite a bit of interest, and I want to compliment the Department of Justice for the consultation process that they went through. They did get quite a bit of interest from stakeholders, quite a number of submissions, and they considered all of the issues that were brought forward by the stakeholders who made submissions...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank the mover and the seconder for bringing this motion forward. I am in support of this motion, and I just have a few brief comments.

We have a very high incidence of domestic violence in our territory, unfortunately, and that’s been pointed out already. The thing that I struggle with, that I have difficulty with is that we can’t seem to find a solution. It’s a very complicated issue, but we continue to work to try to make things better, to try to reduce the incidents of domestic violence in our territory.

One of the organizations that are doing good work and...

I would ask the Minister to look into this a little further. I think he ought to check with managers of every department and find out. There are, from what I understand, a number of people who work from home and their home is not in the NWT.

I’d like to ask the Minister, if he says that he’s looking into this and he thinks people should be working here, if we do have employees who live outside the NWT, I find it very hard to understand how that fits in with our policy of 2,000 people in the NWT in the next five years. How does it fit in that we allow this to happen?

I couldn’t quite hear the Minister at the end but I thought he said that he was going to encompass in the HR Manual all the policies, all the various policies that we have, the one for voluntary separation, the one for affected employees. I can’t remember the names, but there are two or three other ones.

Is that what the Minister said, that he is going to encompass all policies in the HR Manual, and if that’s the case, when will that be done?