Wendy Bisaro

Mr. Chair, I got a little confused there. So we have deputy minister, we have an associate – I believe that’s Mr. Heide – and we have two assistant DMs. Mr. Heide is retiring soon, so we have three now, or we have four now, or we’re going back to three? I got lost there. Thanks.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I too want to welcome Mr. Campbell. It’s been a great pleasure to work with him over the years that I’ve been here. I know that he’s approaching retirement with the same mindset as I am: looking forward to it. I wish him well and thank him for all the work that he’s done for us over the years. Thank you.

That’s good. Thanks, Mr. Chair. I’m done.

Thanks to the Minister. So, there are five new positions that are being decentralized, the service officers. The other four positions that he’s mentioned, the two linguists and the two registrars, I guess, are those positions filled at the moment? Thank you.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I’m just wondering why the decrease in the contribution to A Brilliant North. This is increasing the capacity in our community staffings and it’s gone down $100,000, which is not a heck of a lot of money, but I’m sure, over a number of communities, would have a very large impact. We went up quite a bit in ’14-15 but now we’ve gone down $100,000. Can I get a reason? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To the Minister: I guess I have to say that I’m asking specifically about Yellowknife. This is my constituency; it’s my community. So, I’ve been blacklisted by the Housing Corp. I’ve been blacklisted by Northern Properties. There’s absolutely no place that I can get into except to go to a motel.

Why is it that it’s okay for income support clients to get assistance from the YWCA, which is transition housing, but it’s not okay for me to get assistance when I go to a motel because that’s the absolute only place where I can live? Thank you.

So where would that responsibility lie? Which department? Thank you.

Thanks to the Minister. That was my recollection that it was for training and for equipment. Has the department encountered situations where a community does not go onto the highway to provide ground ambulance and/or rescue services because they’ve determined that it’s costing them money, it’s outside their municipal boundaries, there’s no reimbursement from the territorial government for the expense that they are incurring? Is this something that the department has seen and/or heard about? Because I can foresee that the time is going to come when a municipality is going to say we can’t afford...

Thanks to the Minister. I didn’t hear a definition in there so I guess I have to assume that the department does not have a definition of transition housing.

I’d like to know from the Minister, if they don’t have a definition of transition housing, is there a written policy that they use when they are determining whether or not somebody is in transition housing or not? Certainly, there are people who, in the city of Yellowknife, for instance, because of the almost monopoly that Northern Properties has on housing, if they’ve been banned from Northern Properties, if they have a family they can’t...

I guess that tells me that you haven’t heard from the local Aboriginal government, but the intention, and I guess the policy is that this land withdrawal will stay in place until there’s a land claim agreement. Is that correct?