Wendy Bisaro

Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Mr. Hawkins.

Thank you, committee. Mr. Abernethy, could you introduce your witnesses for the record, please?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a number of questions. This section covers quite a bit, so I may jump around a little. I would like to first of all ask about – and this might have been asked before and I apologize if it has – the Early Childhood Development Program which is under education and culture.

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Maybe you should advise… Oh, the clerk is looking after your earpiece item. Mr. Abernethy, I think the question is where do these numbers show up elsewhere in the budget. Mr. Abernethy.

Alright, committee, we will come back to order. Minister Abernethy, do you have some witnesses you’d like to bring into the House?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I believe the directorate deals with document management and so on. The government is implementing an electronic records and document management system, I believe. The Department of Education, Culture and Employment deals with requests for fairly sensitive material I think in some cases relative to a residential school, students and so on. When the Information and Privacy Commissioner made her report a couple of months ago to committee, there was a concern on her part that the government is not necessarily always being as judicious as we should be in looking after our...

Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Mr. Lewis.

I didn’t hear much there about promotion. I mean, it’s a wonderful idea to have a storefront, but there are an awful lot of people who look for stuff from the North and they look for it from afar. They’re not here and they’d be quite happy to buy stuff on-line. I would like to ask the Minister, and I appreciate that he’s committed to look into possibly linking artists, all our artisans to the NWT Tourism website, but he’s talking many months down the road. I would like to suggest this is not an expensive proposition. If people are on-line already, it’s a simple matter to link them to our NWT...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a number of comments as well. Some of them are going to be repetitive, but I think they bear repeating.

At the outset, I want to say that I’m dismayed about the lack of progress in the department on reducing our graduation rates. I feel that the department is doing a lot of really good things. We have a lot of projects on the go, but they don’t seem to be all that coordinated, and in my estimation, we’re not spending enough, we don’t put enough emphasis on basic education. Whether it be preschool, whether it be K to 12, even, I think, advanced education. I think...

Page 7-24, Public Works and Services, information item, lease commitments, infrastructure. Any questions? Seeing none, we will move on to page 7-26, Public Works and Services, information item, Technology Service Centre (Chargeback). Mr. Hawkins.