Wendy Bisaro

One of the jobs that Members take as committee is to also monitor what’s going on, and when we receive a report and see recommendations in there, it’s very helpful for us to get some kind of an update on where the recommendations are at. If the coroner is following up, that’s one thing, but is there any opportunity for a department, whether it be Justice or whether it be individual departments who have received the recommendation, but is it conceivable that standing committee could get some kind of an update on recommendations in coroners’ reports? It doesn’t have to be for every report, but...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Two questions that I believe we discussed when we were reviewing the business plans but I’m not sure, so I’d like to raise them. I forgot to raise them in my general comments. With the rental office, we now have a rental officer and a deputy or an assistant rental officer. We have seen over the last couple of years that the number of inquiries and the needs within that rental office have increased considerably. I would like to know whether or not having the two officers in the office is enough or is there consideration by the department to add a third person to handle the...

So, to the Minister: What’s the expected date of construction and when might the facility be open? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We’d like to continue with TD 188-17(5), continuing with the Department of Justice and, time permitting, start on the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment.

Thank you. So I gather we have no plan. We’re going to turn the legislation over to each individual department. They will do what they will do. I’d like to suggest, again, this is very complex legislation, and I would also like to suggest that not everybody has access to a computer and asking the question by the computer does not lend itself to making suggestions for amendments to a complex piece of legislation.

So can the Premier indicate to me, if we turn this legislation over to individual departments, what kind of a time frame are we talking about? Can he give me any idea as to when we can...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are addressed to the Premier. I want to follow up on my Member’s statement and ask some questions about plans for amendments and changes to the devolution legislation we passed a year ago.

With devolution, we accepted the federal legislation holus-bolus. There were no changes to any of that legislation when we took it over. We put our name on it but we accepted it as it had been with the feds.

I’d like to thank the Premier for his commitment for us to look at all those pieces of legislation and for us to review them, but I’d like to know from the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. On April 1, 2014, the NWT achieved our long sought after goal of devolution, and with devolution the GNWT accepted seven pieces of federal legislation as our own. We established NWT acts that mirrored the federal acts.

At the time many residents expressed concern about adopting these laws exactly as written by the federal government, unchanged and unevaluated. Many questioned when the legislation would be evaluated, when it would be amended to suit the NWT, our unique government and territory. We certainly heard a commitment from the Premier to review the seven pieces of...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just have two comments that I want to make here, and the Minister has heard them already, but they bear repeating. One is my concern with the decentralization of the parks office to Hay River. Not so much that we are moving the positions but that we are uprooting families and forcing people who have lived here for a very long time to reconsider their life’s path, to reconsider whether they are going to take their spouse out of a job and move them with them, children in school. That whole ball of wax that I talked about the other day. I would just like to state again...

I guess maybe the Minister is thinking of something different than what I’m thinking of. The coroner’s report, from my recollection, does not give us how recommendations were handled, what an individual department did with those recommendations. So it’s conceivable that the Standing Committee on Social Programs, for instance, may ask for the data, all the recommendations that came from the coroner in the last year, please provide us with how the recommendations were handled, what each department did. I guess what I’m suggesting is instead of waiting for standing committee to ask for it, the...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Thanks to the deputy minister for that. My next question has to do with coroners’ reports. The coroners’ reports go to the department and they also often go to committee. Quite regularly the coroner has recommendations within his or her report.

I would like to know from the Minister when a report has a recommendation to a particular department, the coroner falls under Justice but it may be a recommendation to, say, the Department of Health and Social Services, so I would like to know from the Minister what action Justice takes to ensure the coroner’s recommendations are...