Robert Hawkins

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Like my colleagues, I wish to recognize all the Pages, most particularly the Pages from Mildred Hall who are representing us today. Specifically I would like to recognize a constituent. I believe her name is Genzi Zhang. Thank you for your work. I am glad to have all Pages here. It’s a great opportunity for all. Thank you.

Thank you. At present, I know it’s a moving number, the 146 mentioned earlier. Do we have any breakdown of what that actually is? Single people? Single parents with children? Dual parents without kids, with kids? How many are seniors? Especially certainly the last one by all means, but those types of statistics and breakdown to the numbers. Thank you.

Was it predicated on an incident or changing a standard in work environment? Was it a union initiative? Was it brought to the department because of some type of concern? Thank you.

Does Housing intend to be involved or support the expansion initiative over at Avens for seniors?

I’m not sure it’s worth questioning anymore. The information will come. We all know… What do we have? We have five days left in the Assembly. I’m sure it will show up on my desk on October 9th. It’s really disappointing. To say that it travels to Behchoko now from three to five days a week to at least twice a month, that tells me… It just doesn’t tell me it’s needed. I think I’d like to move a motion to delete it. I think that this is a super-sized vehicle this department and this section doesn’t need. If they need one, keep one in your fleet but you don’t need two super-sized suburbans...

Thank you. I’ll take it that will be before the end of session. That said, has the Minister been approached in the last two years by any community group in Yellowknife to extend the opportunity of housing for seniors? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Minister of Transportation will certainly be the lucky recipient of my questions this afternoon, and I’m sure he’ll be quite pleased to have them. My questions will be focused around, of course, the $32 million claim being submitted by the contractor.

As we understand it, we don’t know what the outcome of that is, so to be clear, I don’t think a decision has been made to spend money or not. But I think it’s important to stress this and build a good foundation on the issue of the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway. I need to be clear, there is no question about the importance...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. From my last question, it’s certainly seen as it can be an obstruction of the freedoms and rights of a Member to do their job if we are not able to participate fundamentally in a meaningful way on decisions of this magnitude. We’re not talking about a $100 decision here; we’re talking about a $32 million decision.

So, how does the Minister expect that we will be meaningfully involved in some type of decision between October 8th and October 25th prior to the election starting, because everybody knows October 8th is the last sitting day. So if they do not have any decision...

I’m sure I don’t need to remind the Minister that we only have basically a week of committee meetings left and the Assembly, of course, is done on October 8th from a sitting point of view and Members are still active, in theory of course, until I think it’s the stroke of midnight on Sunday the 25th.

But decisions are being made behind the scenes and I think the issue really comes down to what assurances can the Minister provide the House publicly that no decision, if there is a situation where there may be a need for extra money, that no decision will be made in absence of the Members having an...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The GNWT announced last week that they are reviewing a $32 million claim submitted by the contractor for the Inuvik-Tuk Highway. As we’ve heard time and time again, this is an iron-clad contract. It’s a fixed price and there will be no need for extra money. Boy, if I had a dollar every time I heard that.

I’m also going to remind everyone that this was a negotiated contract which was promised not to cost more than $299 million. So what happened? As fate would have it, an e-mail error through our good colleague Mr. Menicoche certainly sheds some new light on this project...