Caroline Wawzonek

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, in many ways this is the culmination of why ISSS was created in the first place under the last administration and now is coming more and more to its fruition. Again, I know we've said this more times than I would like to count, COVID was not a help in this particular regard. It was certainly a big draw on this particular division to pause some of the transitions required during COVID. But now turning back to what should be regular business, the chief information office does create a business partner approach with departments. This is meant to have that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the Member's observation. There certainly are budget lines that go department by department, which can make it difficult perhaps to look at it from a corporate perspective. I am, however, happy to say the Department of Finance is now putting in practice a way to better review and report on those specific items, computer hardware and software. That should make it easier to look at this from a governmentwide perspective and ensure that we are obviously controlling those costs but also better servicing the public through having better control over...

Thank you, Madam Chair. So, Madam Chair, I can say that refundable tax credits do show up in the public accounts but something that is a non-refundable credit may not be the same. Obviously, we'll certainly do our best to try to make better use of the information sharing provisions. But, I mean, if there are specific elements of tax credits or specific tax provisions that the Member's interested in getting information on, you know, if we can get that, again, I'm happy to try to distill that data as much as possible. This, theoretically, is supposed to help with that data collection from the...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I do remember that exchange, Madam Chair, and I apologize if we didn't include that on any correspondence to committee. I did just confirm again now with the Department of Finance, as I had at the time, that, indeed, these were changes that were slow in coming from the federal government and so we are simply aligning with the calendar that they had or the timelines that they had put forward on their side. So, again, I ought to have conveyed that to committee earlier; I apologize for not doing so. Thank you.

Yes, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Again, Mr. Speaker, very timely. This is something that I think a lot of the provinces and territories are becoming very aware of and the importance of. It's a table that provinces and territories sit at together as a symposium because it's an issue that doesn't necessarily get the attention until something goes wrong. So very happy to be able to speak to it now, to give it that kind of attention it deserves in advance so we can try to be more proactive going forward. As I've said, Mr. Speaker, the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the helm of Information...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Member must be reading my social media. I had the opportunity to attend an FPT recently where I think my lead word was "interoperability." It is something that, quite frankly, doesn't sound very exciting, not the sort of thing that gets somebody's political blood boiling, but is quite critical to the functioning of the services from the IT perspective and one that we need to do a better job of, Mr. Speaker. There's really no way around that. So I'm pleased to have some attention here. It's been brought to my attention by my officials that lack of...

Mr. Speaker, the federal backstop is not going to be providing individualized COLA payments or individual payments based upon communities in the Northwest Territories. More likely than not, and I can't say for sure because I don't know what they're going to do. I certainly had no control over the fact that they decided to change their program to remove the fact that they're being a connection to the pricing signal, remove the exemption for heating fuel. That was entirely a federal decision. If we put ourselves into that, into their system, we have even less control over what happens with the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, so, again, the carbon tax is not a tax of the making of the Government of the Northwest Territories. It is a federal tax. But by trying to maintain our own system to it, we're well placed or better placed, in my view, to be responsive to the needs of individual communities, including those of the residents in Nunakput. So what the Department of Finance has done is calculate what we would anticipate both the direct and indirect costs of the federal carbon tax would be and we've divided up based on three zones of the Northwest Territories high fuel use...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, again, there has actually been quite a lot of public engagement in the last six years, quite a lot of feedback provided, not the least of which even includes the dialogue within this House. That is not lost. There's always public servants listening to everything that's said here. There's public servants that attend every public briefing in standing committee. There's been public servants involved in this work, again, since 2017, getting a very solid and thorough understanding. And now the work has gone through a process of codevelopment with Indigenous...