Debates of August 20, 2007 (day 13)

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. You can table those as a package.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I give notice that on Wednesday, August 22, 2007, I will move the following motion: Now therefore I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Sahtu, that this Legislative Assembly strongly recommends the GNWT undertake and disclose updated economic modeling showing the Deh Cho Bridge project’s anticipated socio-economic impact and benefits, as it did in 2003; and further that this Legislative Assembly strongly recommends the GNWT defer signing any further agreements concerning the Deh Cho Bridge until after the 16th Assembly is in office. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I give notice that on Wednesday, August 22, 2007, I will move the following motion: Now therefore I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Hay River South, that this Legislative Assembly strongly recommends the Minister responsible for the Workers’ Compensation Board extend Mr. Denny Rodgers’ appointment as chair of the Governance Council to April 12, 2008. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Good afternoon, Members. I will call Committee of the Whole to order. We have several matters before us today. What is the wish of the committee? Mr. Lafferty.

Mahsi, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, the committee wishes to consider Bill 18, Supplementary Appropriation Act, No. 2, 2007-2008, and Bill 15, Liquor Act. Mahsi, Madam Chair.

Mahsi, Mr. Lafferty. Is committee agreed?

Agreed.

Agreed. We’ll proceed with that after a brief break.

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I will call Committee of the Whole back to order. The first item on our agenda this afternoon is Bill 18, Supplementary Appropriation Act, No. 2, 2007-2008. At this time, I will ask the Minister of Finance if he will please give his opening comments.

Mr. Chairman, Supplementary Appropriation Act, No. 2, 2007-2008 requests authority for additional appropriations of $6.004 million for operations expenditures and $3.615 million for capital investment expenditures in the 2007-2008 fiscal year.

Major items included in this request for operations expenditures include:

$2.45 million for the creation and implementation of a Tourism Product Diversification and Marketing Program;

$1.98 million to fund the projected shortfall of the forest fire suppression budget for the 2007 fire season. This amount is net of recoveries through the Mutual Aid Resource Sharing Agreement for fire suppression activities within other jurisdictions;

$940,000 to provide appropriation authority to draw down funding provided by the federal government through the patient wait times guarantee trust fund;

$856,000 to fund the cost of immediate repair of a section of the Hay River runway; and

$533,000 to provide contribution funding to three groups under the Western Harvesters' Assistance Program.

Major items included in the request for capital investment expenditures include:

$1.6 million to fund the purchase of five modular classrooms for the Ecole St. Joseph School renovation project; and

$570,000 to cover a funding shortfall in the water and sewer upgrade project for the Ecole Allain St. Cyr and William MacDonald School.

Also included in the request are two reallocations from operations expenditures to capital investment expenditures, as follows:

$523,000 to fund a shortfall in the costs associated with the upgrade to PeopleSoft 8.9; and

$417,000 to begin preliminary work in 2007-2008 for a territorial dementia facility to be constructed in Yellowknife.

That concludes my opening remarks. I would be pleased to answer any questions Members may have. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. There is no committee response to this bill. At this time, I would like to ask the Minister if he would like to bring witnesses into the Chamber. Minister Roland.

Yes, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Minister Roland. Does committee agree?

Agreed.

Agreed. At this time, I will ask the Sergeant-at-Arms to escort the witnesses to the table.

Minister Roland, would you please introduce your witnesses for the record?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, to my right is secretary to the FMB, Mr. Cleveland; and to my right is Mr. Sandy Kalgutkar, director of budget evaluation of FMBS. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Roland. General comments. Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Dealing with Supplementary Appropriation Act, No. 2, there are a few things that I wanted to get on record as saying. I guess I’ll start with the $523,000 to fund the shortfall and costs associated with the upgrade of PeopleSoft 8.9. As the Minister and other Ministers have heard earlier in this session, in fact if you go back to 1997 when PeopleSoft was first looked at as a product for the Government of the Northwest Territories, the government has spent approximately $8 million on PeopleSoft in total and that’s implementation costs and the costs upfront. It’s a substantial amount of money, Madam Chair. Given the problems that we’ve had with PeopleSoft and the implementation in the last little while, I am just wondering what assurances the Minister can have that an additional half a million dollars is going to correct the issues that are at play with PeopleSoft, and when can the employees expect that this system will be up and running without any kinks in it and be able to be fully utilized, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The PeopleSoft program does have a long history with the Government of the Northwest Territories as we had to renew our past system of payroll and dealing with employees. PeopleSoft originally came into the government, as the Member stated, back in ’97 or ’98 and the government-of-the-day was looking to replace an older system. What we found in the day was the fact that as the program was brought in, the government did not take the program in the form it was delivered. In fact, I guess the proper terminology is it would be customized to fit the existing government processes. At that point, it was felt that was the best way to go. Since then, with every upgrade that’s come online we have found it more and more difficult. In fact, trying to save some dollars, we did not do an upgrade every year. We upgraded every couple of years and recently we found the old version was not going to be supported, so 8.9 was the program that we had to upgrade to. By doing that, we found ourselves in a fair bit of difficulty trying to rectify original customizations done to the program to fit the PeopleSoft program as it was designed, hence the problems we have found with it. We hope now that as we are in the process of going through the pure form of PeopleSoft 8.9, we will get away from the problems that occurred.

As for giving an actual time or deadline as to when things will be 100 percent okay, as we all know, to err is human; to really screw up, you need a computer. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland, for that profound enlightenment. Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I haven’t been given a real comforting answer by the Minister. If he spends half a million in additional money in implementing PeopleSoft 8.9, what assurances do we have that we are not wasting another half a million dollars and next year we aren’t going to waste some more? We’ve come to a certain point with PeopleSoft. We’ve spent $8 million and it’s still not working. I think at some point in time somebody is going to have to answer some questions. Why isn’t it working? Who customized it? Why did it happen and why are we still paying the price? Somebody has to take responsibility for it and somebody has to provide this House with some answers. There has been $8 million spent over the past 10 years and we are spending another half a million. To what end, is what I am getting at, Madam Chair, to what end are we spending this half a million and should we be looking at an entirely new system? Let’s start from scratch. Why should we be paying good money after bad and are we doing that? Are we paying good money after bad with PeopleSoft, Madam Chair?

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, more on the serious side of our transition, we can’t turn the clock back to 1997 or 1998 when the decision was made at the time to customize the program to fit our processes as the Government of the Northwest Territories. Hindsight being 20/20, if we could do that again, we would stay with the pure form of the program and we would adopt our processes to fit it which would provide for a much cleaner process. Will that stop absolutely everything from occurring? As those of us who have home computers realize, that’s not necessarily going to be the case. On an annual basis, there will have to be upgrades and new licences bought as we put in new systems and new computers in offices across the Territories, so that will be an additional cost there. But for the problem itself in the customization of the original program, I can’t go back and try to justify why the decision was made back then and going to a customized version or creating that customization. We, as we found out now, are not in a position to continue with that customization. In fact, that program through the customization wasn’t being fully utilized. That is the goal now, is to go to the pure form of 8.9 and use the programs as they were designed. We, as a government, will have to change our processes. For the majority of things, if you look at it, are cleaned up. There are a couple of modules that were causing problems as of recently and causing much grief for employees across the Northwest Territories. Once that is fixed, we should be able to proceed forward with minimal interruptions. But as for a guarantee of one going forward, I don’t know if anybody can give that. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I am just following up to that. If I was a business owner and I had spent a substantial amount of money like $8 million in one program area, and that is PeopleSoft, over the past 10 years and I was getting the service or the delivery of the program wasn’t what I thought it would be and maybe some things had happened in the past -- maybe my employees tinkered with it too much or did something to it -- I would want to get a third party, somebody to come in and tell me what has been happening with my investment of $8 million. I am wondering if the Minister has ever gone out and got a thorough analysis of what exactly has gone wrong with PeopleSoft. If he hasn’t, I would suggest that he does that. Has the Minister and the government ever involved the Audit Bureau in taking a look at getting into the fine details of what exactly happened? I think the Audit Bureau would be a good place to start. If you spent $8 million and you don’t get the product that it was intended for, well, then you have a problem. I think somebody, like I said, Madam Chair, should be responsible. Somebody should have to answer questions. If I was a business owner, again, and if I spent $8 million and somebody went in and tinkered with my program and caused me to spend more millions of dollars, I would want to know what happened, who it was and when it happened. Do you know what? There would be repercussions because of what happened. In this instance, we don’t seem to be there. We just continue to spend money and we don’t go back. I really do think we need to go back and find out what happened so the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated and there is proper protocol when somebody is going in there and chopping up a program that we spent millions of dollars on, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, FMBS has gone out to do a review of the situation. Again, just for the record, I have to state that the PeopleSoft system itself, which is used by a majority of other jurisdictions in very similar circumstances through government and companies, the system itself isn’t the problem. It is the fact that a decision was made when we first, as the GNWT, took on this new program and decided to customize it to fit our processes, not use the program as it was initially designed. The fact that the government-of-the-day used it in limited versions and customized it was okay when they did minimal upgrades every couple of years. But when the program itself became unsupportable unless going up to the newer version and then having to un-customize or to go the pure form of the program has caused many of the problems that we are facing today. So, ultimately, we do know what is happening. It is the fact that a decision was made in the past to customize a program and we are unable to continue with that customized program. Thank you, Madam Chair.

As we proceed forward, we will be using the program as it was designed. That is the PeopleSoft 8.9 without any customizations to it. We are going to change our process as a government to fit the program and be more functional. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Next on the list I have Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I would like to speak on a specific item on the Minister’s opening statement. It speaks to a specific project, but I am going to make it into a general comment because it is included in his statement, Madam Chair. That has to do with an item in the budget for the dementia centre. Madam Chair, I just want to thank the Minister very much. I don’t mind being effusive and being totally shamelessly thanking the Minister for moving this project forward. Madam Chair, I just want to say that.

All the Yellowknife Members here know, especially the ones such as Mr. Braden who has been here at the same time as me, this has been on the books for a long time. Even as of last summer, I couldn’t really respond to a senior who said I don’t think I am ever going to see this project get off the ground. I know that all of the Yellowknife MLAs have been working really hard to make this project happen. But I could tell you from sitting where I was as a chair of the Standing Committee on Social Programs, it really wasn’t until the Minister got on board that he really looked at the project. After one or two briefings, he really came to a position on what he wanted to do with it. He set boundaries and directions. He put staff into it to have them look at it. He has made a lot of incremental decisions to make it happen. I just want to acknowledge that. I know lots of other Ministers here do a lot of good work. I think when the good work gets done, it should be acknowledged.

This facility is not just for Yellowknife. It is something that is going to be more and more needed as we go forward. You know that the dementia and other conditions related to that is something that is becoming more and more common. This is going to be a territorial facility that will serve all of the seniors in the Territories, but unfortunately as the numbers grow, we are going to be able to use that expertise and to enhance programs in regional centres. Already in Hay River and I believe in Fort Simpson and Fort Smith, services for our elders with a minor form of dementia are being serviced there. I know that the territorial dementia centre is only a start. We, as a government, have to prepare years down the road to serve our residents who are going to need our service more and more. I think we owe it to the Minister for taking it on last fall and really looking at it closely, looking at numbers and what was happening and really took control of it and put it through the Cabinet in a way that was affordable to the government. More importantly, he has been able to bring partners into the process.

Let me just say I know the Minister didn’t do it all by himself. We have to thank our private partners, Diavik and, in particular, Mr. Zelinski who has really stepped forward in a big way. I do understand that the details have to be worked out, but I think we really need to acknowledge the fact that you could have lots of players wanting to do a lot of good, but you do need somebody in the middle, in the centre, who takes on the leadership role and makes everybody do what is right in the interests of the total project. I just want to take a moment to thank the Minister for what he has done and for the seniors of not only Yellowknife but the Territories. I have said enough to secure this for the next budget as well, but the big number is coming in the next Legislature. So thank you so much.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. I didn’t hear any questions there. Would the Minister like to respond? Minister Roland.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I thank the Member for her comments but, at the same, I have to state that she has as well. This project has been under some review for quite some time. In fact, 2005-06 was when the Department of Health and Social Services started working with the Yellowknife Association of Concerned Citizens for Seniors and looking at the planning and design of this facility. When I became involved, there was a concern that this project had grown substantially and became unaffordable. At that point, I decided that we needed to sit down again with the group to revise the plan, to look at it to see if we can come up with something that was workable for all parties and affordable for the Government of the Northwest Territories. Yes, it includes taking in partners in this. We have to thank them for their work, as well.

It is a territorial facility and will be treated as such, looking at residents from the whole of the territory. It is a much needed facility as are a number of other facilities that the department is looking at. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Next on the list I have Mr. Braden.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, there are a couple of things in here that should be celebrated, as Ms. Lee pointed out, when we see good work, even if it is the result of years of hard slogging. When the paperwork actually lands on the desk and we are given the chance to say yes to it and really have it mean something, then that is something that makes this job worthwhile.

Ms. Lee has highlighted the territorial dementia centre, a long sought after program. Madam Chair, I think just about all Members, members of the general public, the media, have all heard the stories of families that are dealing with their parents and relatives who are undergoing the inevitable terrible devastation of these kinds of diseases and the lack of a facility here in Yellowknife. One that is capable of looking after people on a territory-wide basis is very welcome news. Ms. Lee has highlighted the work of other partners in here. This is a really innovative approach and one that I am proud to have had some part in, but I am much more proud and satisfied to see that we are actually going to be committing to it.

Madam Chair, I think that I would also like to celebrate the $1.6 million that is earmarked for the purchase of modular classrooms for Ecole St. Joseph. This was done. Many factors are at play in the school agenda here in Yellowknife, but the principal one here was reacting or responding to the devastating fire of just about a year ago now at this school. So this is welcome.

Madam Chair, I also welcome the almost $2.5 million for the Tourism Product Diversification and Marketing Program. As the tourism industry enlarge in one sector, which is the outfitting and sports hunting sector went through and is still going through some wrenching changes, Madam Chair. As Members know, I have been a vocal critic of the way our government has responded to this situation, in part because of the business agenda that I think we left behind. We left a number of operators really holding the bag for far too long. While I say I celebrate this move to look at how we can diversify our tourism product, it is something that is overdue. Let’s just get on with the job.

Madam Chair, I want to take this opportunity to ask for some additional information and clarification on one item that committee found lacking in the development of this appropriation. That is the $100,000 that is requested to enable the Premier, I understand, and officials and members of the private sector to go to China next month on a…I guess the best I know about it is that there is a largely business agenda. Tourism is one of the topics that is at its forefront. But, Madam Chair, usually committee is given ample notice, detail and information on the nature of these kinds of fairly high profile and, I would like to think, very beneficial visits. We have not had the benefit of that in this request for $100,000. I would like to ask the Minister if he could at this time, or at some point over the next few minutes during our debate of this bill, supply us with information about the nature, the objectives, the participants, the outcomes that are anticipated from this mission to China.

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Mr. Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, if it is alright, I can go into the detail now or we can do it later on; but if it is raised now, work has been done on this initiative through the Department of ITI looking at a number of factors, the goals of it or working with the business community, looking at emerging business in the Northwest Territories as well as the tourism side of the equation in trying to grow that side of the economy here in the Northwest Territories. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Mr. Braden.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Is that the extent of the information that the Minister is able to provide?

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, for more of the detail, we will go to the Minister responsible for ITI.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Mr. Bell.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. For the last several years, my department has been lobbying Chinese trade officials to try to build a program to go to China and open some doors for some of our businesspeople specifically in tourism and also some opportunities we see in transportation. But tourism, as we have seen with the aurora industry coming under additional pressure, Japanese numbers are falling off. We have been looking at a logical market to diversify to. All evidence points to China and its 1.3 billion people as being very prospective for us in terms of aurora tourism, but we are having difficulty getting an invitation at the appropriate levels that would allow us to build a trade mission to China, so we had the Premier speak to some Hong Kong investors in Toronto and some trade officials and investors in Edmonton. We were pleased that, on the heels of that, we did receive an invitation from the proper levels of the Chinese government for the Premier to lead a trade mission to China and to make the connections for a number of our businesspeople who could benefit from such a mission and such contact. So the reason it comes at the end of this government, we wish we had advanced further on this sooner because we know what great pressure our tourism industry is under, but we are still thankful that we did receive the invitation for the Premier to come and lead this delegation. That piece was critical in China. We needed to have it at that level in order to get the attention of business there and the proper protocol at the government level. So we believe that this can be very successful.

It certainly can’t be the last China trade mission. The Department of Yukon I think has been there, in my recollection, over the last year or so three or so times to China on similar trade missions. So we know that there will need to be follow-up with more business officials, more departmental officials, but we have this opportunity here and we think there is some merit in seizing on it. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bell. Mr. Braden.

Thank you for that information. Does it not seem a bit unusual, if I could continue to direct the question to Mr. Bell, that we are undertaking this mission, yes, at the very end of this Assembly and our senior official, Mr. Handley, I understand is going to be leading the delegation. He is not returning to this Assembly.

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How is it, Mr. Chair, that this government wants to undertake this when the Minister quite rightly points out that this should only be the first of many delegations and building this market? It just seems quite unusual that we are putting this together under the direction of our senior politician who is not going to be here in the coming Assembly and who will not be on tap to follow up and carry through with this. My point is, as desirable a mission as this is, doesn’t it make more sense to take this good planning, defer it and allow the senior people from the next Assembly to take it on?

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Mr. Roland.