Wendy Bisaro

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to start today by praising the Finance Minister for the initiative he has shown for holding budget dialogue events for the last three years, allowing NWT residents to comment on NWT budgets.

Over the three years the meetings have produced considerable feedback, but due to the timing of the forums, I’m not sure that feedback has actually been used. I have to wonder about the value for money of this initiative. Having said that, though, I’ve previously said that we can’t put a price on democracy. Consultation is a necessary evil of government.

This year there were...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to spend some time today talking about decentralization. I’ve been pretty much silent on the subject to date, but I can no longer be silent. I have grave misgivings about this policy and its implementation.

We have only to look eastward to Nunavut where they are reversing their previous actions and bringing positions back to Iqaluit. Why? Because decentralization is not working. I appreciate the intent of the policy, but, and it’s a very large but, I cannot condone the current mindset around the implementation of the Decentralization Policy.

The Minister of...

No.

Mr. Chair, I guess I missed that conversation. I don’t remember being asked what I thought. I guess I would suggest to the Minister that we need to go a little further afield than just MLAs when we’re getting input on whether or not a campaign school should be held more often.

My second question has to do with page 34 where it references a review of negotiating mandates. One of the things that have concerned me for a while is the position of the federal government with regard to funding of not negotiations, but funding of the agreements. They have a policy called Fiscal Harmonization Initiative...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just have a couple of questions here. Mr. Moses has already referenced the increase to the Native Women’s Association and to the Status of Women Council of the NWT. I’m glad to see that a couple of organizations which do work outside of government have been given an increase. I gather that it’s up to each organization within each department to kind of scream and holler for money, and that’s unfortunate. I would urge the Minister, as Premier, to look across government and maybe set something in place so that organizations are evaluated more often than every five years...

Thanks to the deputy minister for the answer. I wanted to lastly ask about succession planning. We know that we have a large number of our fairly senior staff who are going to be leaving the employ of the GNWT due to retirement over the next five to 10 years, and I believe that in the last year or so we’ve heard from the Department of HR that they are working on succession planning.

I would like to know how they assist various departments in this succession planning, and I think there are one or two initiatives that are out there. How are those initiatives working? Do you feel that there’s been...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to just follow up a bit from where I left off yesterday. I had asked about a retention strategy. The answer that I got from Ms. Desjardins talked a lot about recruitment but didn’t talk much about retention. So I’d like to ask again, what are we doing? Do we have a retention strategy, was my first question, and what are we doing to retain employees? What retention efforts are we putting in place? Thank you.

Thanks to the Premier for that, and I think those are all good things. Providing housing and providing office space is definitely a good thing.

I’d like to ask the Premier if he has considered the recent actions of Nunavut, that they are reverting from decentralization back to centralizing some of their programs and services and people in Iqaluit. Have we as a government taken a look at why their decentralization did not work or are we blindly going down the same path?

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Just a question here. I note from the ’14-15 Main Estimates to the ’15-16 Main Estimates the amounts are pretty similar but the revised estimates for ’14-15 went up some $200,000 or so. Could I get an explanation as to why the revised mains are so much higher and why we’ve gone back down to a lower number for the start of this budget? Thank you.

I challenge the Premier to prove to me that we are improving the efficiency of programs and services when we remove long-standing employees from the position where they have become quite proficient.

To the Premier, I’d like to know what analysis has been done of the actions taken with regard to decentralization to date. What are the results from, I think it’s phase one and phase two that we’ve completed at this point of the decentralization plan? How many positions were vacant? How many were vacant or new positions? How many employees did we lose? How many employees left the NWT taking our $25...