Robert Hawkins

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. If the Premier is offering to resign, we could take care of that today, honestly.

So, quite frankly, the question keeps being missed and the Premier can distract it with any joke or whatnot, but he is avoiding the true responsibility and accountability that is being called for by this House. This is the question yet again, and he can make all the jokes he wants but it doesn’t deter the facts of what the public sees.

Cabinet makes these secret appointments. Nobody knows how many they are making, nobody knows why they are being appointed and these people show up in these...

That was an original answer, Mr. Speaker. I am not sure to even bother acknowledging it.

Why won’t the McLeod government show some courage for a change and say we’ll prove that these direct appointments were meaningful and appropriate and we can honestly measure them? Right now, there’s zero accountability on a single one of them.

Again to the Premier, would he do something different by showing the public he’s being accountable by annually tabling who got these jobs and which jobs they went to?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There has been a lot of discussion in this House about GNWT jobs as of late. How many are being created through devolution? Are they being decentralized? Are small communities getting their fair share? Certainly we’ve heard a fair bit about the advertisement about these mystery jobs out there. How many are truly vacant and certainly where is the money going?

I recognize, as do all my colleagues recognize, how important jobs are to Northerners. I wish this government would wake up and smell the coffee and stop hiding all of those jobs. On that particular point, we often...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’m just going to use this opportunity to highlight a few areas of general concern. Of course, I’d certainly like to see ourselves do a little more in the treatment area. I’m not sure that the Minister’s Forum, in my view, was their forum panel, and certainly research done on addictions and whatnot was the approach I would have liked to have seen. They have come up with some recommendations, but like anything, it’s all about implementation and how we follow through. There was a commitment in there, the observation of making a treatment centre available or treatment...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Clearly, justice isn’t being served.

What options lie before this particular proponent who wants to bid on this contract and yet they have people who go out there and sandbag their potential credibility on this, which could cause them not to be in a position to qualify as they bid for this.

You know, we can only hide behind the fairness commissioner answer so long. The fact is, what options lie before them, what authorities fall under the ability of the fairness commissioner, and again, why have a fairness commissioner if the Minister is just going to keep saying over...

There must be some authority that the Minister can answer in the House today that the fairness commissioner can do and investigate. It’s not about deciding about the contract. I’m just saying when we’ve got corporate espionage in some form or fashion, if that really is the case, I don’t know, and I want to give them the chance to review it properly because they are the experts.

What type of remedies and options lie before this person providing this? What’s the point of having a fairness commissioner if they won’t review the situation? I don’t know; I’m trying to bring it to the Minister so we...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Minister should resign himself to the fact that he should know this.

Next question. We know many times with historical values of vacant positions, which is approximately 14, 15, 16 percent, but if we use it as a rolling number, to be fair, that’s approximately $15 million passed in this House that are human resources compensation and benefits dollars each and every year.

So, what does the Department of Human Resources do to track that money, the $15 million that nobody knows where it’s going? How do we follow the money? The department may say that this is micro...

I want to ask the Minister for, quite simply, a clear and simple answer. We have 35 positions, which probably roughly works out to about $3.5 million, which were originally intended for human resource money that could actually put that nurse in Colville Lake, whether it can put that maintainer back in Paulatuk or other types of plumbers or those types of critical jobs that we always talk about.

My next question for the Minister of Human Resources is: We often hear about the fact that, for example, Stanton runs a deficit, the Beau-Del runs a deficit, all of these organizations run deficits...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to use today’s occasion to return to the northern jobs issue that I, as well as many of my good colleagues, have been raising over the past several days.

We all know very well that we pass compensation dollars here every single year and in every single budget, and we certainly expected that money to be used for the reason it’s passed. It’s difficult for me to go back to the taxpayer to say the government needs more money and they’re not spending it the way we’ve appropriated it. They look and ask what are we really doing here.

Since I’ve been discussing this...

So the Minister is unwilling to provide a solution in the public here. What use is having a fairness commissioner if we have no solution for a particular proponent who wants to bid on this potential contract and is being sandbagged behind the scenes?

Is the government willing to sit by and allow this without providing any options or remedies or just say let it play out? Are we going to hear the same answer, and you might as well just table the answer if that’s what he’s going to do over there. Thank you.