Robert Hawkins

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t have to school a single parent by saying we don’t have a job for every student. They know that. They understand that. They respect that. They know we don’t have the money for that. They’re not fooled. But what they are fooled about and certainly upset about is the myth that their child’s resume is being competitive, and that is making them mad, because they feel they have a fair shot and they’re not getting a fair shot.

All I’m asking this Minister to do, and I’m going to ask him this again, is what type of transparent process can he bring forward to ensure that...

It’s difficult to tell both a parent and a student about the competitive process that they don’t see, don’t know about, and when you tell the parent, well, don’t worry, the system is there for you, I assure you, to be honest, I don’t actually believe that at times, because you hear from parents who see the concern that their kids aren’t being hired, and you hear this regularly.

My question now for the Minister of Human Resources is: What type of public scrutiny process is there to ensure that these potential job openings in departments for summer student positions are not only fair, but honest...

Mr. Chair, after some great consideration and thought, and after his passionate comments provided by my colleague Mr. Yakeleya, I will be supporting the motion. Of course, I will be asking for a recorded vote. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Once again I want to recognize my son McKinley Hawkins, who wrote the speech I had the pleasure of reading today and I want to thank him for allowing me to read his words on his perspective of bullying. That said, I’d like to thank all of my colleagues for sharing the time and allowing me to do as such. I must finish by saying, now I have to get him back to Weledeh. So, thank you very much.

Mr. Chair, so the answer is no, but you take inquiries so that is fine. I see an opportunity to continue this dialogue. The example I provided was an example, one that is sort of in the public realm, one that is easily understood that makes sense to people. Whether they agree or disagree is not the issue as opposed to the example to illustrate is important. Fair enough. That is the only question I have at this particular time. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today’s Member’s statement will be about bullying, and the speech I will be reading today has been penned from the eyes of a 12 year old, who is my son, McKinley, who is in the gallery here today. He has a way of not mixing words, and he has a particular way of being direct, so as such, I will read the speech he gave to his class a few days ago.

One in four teachers see nothing wrong with bullying. This is bad because teachers, the adults, are supposed to give students a proper education and prevent bullying, not sit around and not doing nothing about it.

My name is...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This section isn’t necessarily going to get a compliment. It may be a little more of a link. It is not necessarily criticism either, but what I’m finding here is there are some real concerns about the modernization of our present Liquor Act. Recently I brought some concerns to the Minister of Finance about some problems that we’ve been having in interpretation and certainly in the modernization. Does the Minister see any sort of public dialogue on potentially modernizing some of our liquor laws? As such, we have to sort of balance out what is real and modern and what is...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I share much of the concerns raised by Member Dolynny and thank him for the opportunity to bring the motion forward to talk about it.

I was part of the group in 2007 that was enthusiastically behind this initiative of the program review office and was genuinely optimistic that it would find savings, and it would be designed in a manner to look at savings in sort of a microscopic type of way, forensic, let’s go through these things, what does this mean, what does it affect, how does it have an impact on other things. Once that type of issue and question was qualified...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Without going through a long description as to what I want, I think the Minister knows. If he could provide me with a summary of what is funded, unfunded and empty positions and the value attributed to that. If he could send it to my office, I would be happy with that. Basically the same questions I asked Minister Ramsay in the Justice department. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, after hearing that, it inspired me. I move that we report progress.

---Carried