Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My oral questions today will be following my Member’s statement: the issue with the fact that income support is now transferring back the administration of the housing to the LHO.
I appreciate my colleague from Hay River South who stood up to speak against it. She clearly announced this morning that she would, so I knew she’d let my statement go before hers. But one thing she didn’t talk about is the fact that we’ve got 14 positions out there that were in this original transfer and the fact that it cost $1.5 million to carry this on. So she must be in favour of the fact that these 14 positions are now in flux and we don’t know, and we’re going to get some clarity, hopefully, on this as well as the cost to switch it back.
My question to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment would be: in this transfer of administration back to the LHO, how much will it cost and what will happen to those 14 employees that were brought on board to help with this program?
I’d just like to remind Members to keep your oral questions to a particular matter and not to a particular person. With that, the honourable Minister responsible for Education, Culture and Employment, Mr. Lafferty.
Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. Just for the record, it’s not 14 positions that were transferred. When the transfer occurred in 2006 it was $1.3 million, not $1.5 million. That consisted within that of 10.75 PYs, not 14 positions. I just want to make that clear. But this is still in the planning stages. We just announced within the budget announcement that these programs would be transferred back to the Housing Corporation. Those logistics, the details of it need to be worked out still. We’re in the planning stages. We will be consulting with the standing committees on a going forward basis. We need to identify the detailed information and as we speak we’re going through it in a more detailed fashion.
I consider that a very small error that really tries to find holes in the facts. The facts are that it cost a lot of money to create this transfer and it did create a lot of positions to support this transfer. That’s really the moral of the story. What’s going to happen with that?
To enable this transfer, some study or direction or consultant was hired and I’d like to know what that cost to do this review as well as what was the question they were considering. Was it to fix the program in its existing state or to find a way to return the program to the way it was before?
When we first hired the consultants to do a thorough review of the program that we delivered since the transfer of the program in 2006 we just wanted to capture what we’ve done to date and where we can go from here, what worked, what didn’t work, the causes of it. That is the review that has been undertaken. The report is finalized. The actual cost itself I will need to get back to the Member or Members on that. We’re still working out the logistics of it and there is an error in the report itself. So we’ve gone back to the consultant to provide more detailed information in that respect.
I’ll agree with the Minister that there was an error in the report and that was the decision to transfer it back. I heard from LHO people that this was starting to straighten out. I heard from people on income support who were going through their housing application process that it made sense after a while. I heard from people administering the program that it was really at the end of the day an administration and communication problem was to make sure that the little boxes that got checked at income support fed on through to the folks at LHOs. Was the administration problem and communication problem addressed in this review as one of the things that they could have cleaned up and fixed to streamline the process?
There were no problems. There were challenges that were before us. We worked with those challenges. We continued to improve the program where we met some challenges and we continued to improve in those areas. Right now we’re talking about transferring. I think we’re at that stage where we will be providing more information to the standing committee on a going forward basis on the detailed information. But we faced some challenges. We resolved those challenges, and we continue to improve our program. Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.
Final supplementary, Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, would the Minister agree that one-stop-shopping is more efficient and more cost effective to this government, on its ambition to make people more self-reliant and independent, than two stops? Thank you.
I think the importance is the service delivery, that we do provide subsidies to all Northwest Territories, whether it be one-stop, two-stop, three-stop shop. It’s a core service delivery that we deliver to the communities. So whether the Member is talking about all these shops, we do have a GNWT shop that we have to provide subsidies to the Northwest Territories on core delivery. Mahsi.
The honourable Member for Nunakput, Mr. Jacobson.
