Thank you, Madam Speaker. My questions are to the Minister of Transportation on the launch of the new on-line motor vehicles website and registration. I am wondering: in the development of this, is there an agency that the department uses to make sure we have consistency in presentation? That’s for all departments, but especially in this one, I see that it’s been effective and how do we spread that contagious event?
Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. The honourable Minister of the Department of Transportation, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Madam Speaker. The department is using some organizations in some of the smaller communities. For the most part, we have built our own infrastructure up in the department to be able to provide these services. Thank you.
As we do more and more items on-line, I am wondering about the duality of running a manual system where somebody can come into an office or they can do it on-line.
When are we expecting to go only on-line? What savings are we seeing by just doing on-line and when will we be eliminating, if we will be eliminating, some of the offices we currently go to?
The on-line services at this time are something that we will be running for three years. Then we are looking at re-evaluating or evaluating the service at that time. Currently, we have minimum walk-in services in most places where we do have walk-in services. For example, we have one station in a place like Inuvik where individuals have the option to walk in to do their registrations and so on. If we went to a full system to save some money, we would have to shut that one down. So, we’re thinking of continuing to run a dual system and that system is designed to make things more efficient, especially to provide a better service to the people of the NWT. Thank you.
I wonder if the department is actually seeing any savings by implementing this on-line service or if it’s just for convenience of the general public.
We do not intend to close any of the walk-in services. We would probably not gain any savings. Again, it’s for more efficiency for people who are trying to do their registration. It’s not a huge cost to add this system. On the other hand, the intent is not to save money by closing down the walk-in service. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final supplementary, Mr. Bouchard.
Thank you, Madam Speaker. As I indicated, I am pleased with the service. It is very effective. I guess when we have these types of programs, when we start them, do we have an evaluation process in place to start from the beginning? The Minister indicated three years. Is that the evaluation time period? Are we doing an evaluation after one year, two years and three years? Maybe you could just speak to the evaluation process of this service.
It’s not a huge operation, so if we wish to do so, it would be easy for us to evaluate after year one, after adding the vehicle registration, document replacement, registered permits and some self-management for some of the other tolls and so on. Once we are able to do that through year one, we can actually do a bit of an evaluation on it. We were thinking that we would add everything before we did a thorough evaluation. It looks at the outset that it’s going to be a very good system and people seem to like the ability to register their vehicles at home. So this is something we would maintain, but we can do an evaluation at any time. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. The honourable Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
