Thank you, committee. Sergeant-at-Arms, if you could please escort the witnesses into the Chamber. Thank you.
Mr. McLeod, if you could introduce your witnesses to the House, please.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have, to my left, Mr. Tom Williams, deputy minister, Municipal and Community Affairs. To my right I have Mr. Gary Schauerte, who is our director of corporate services, Municipal and Community Affairs. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister McLeod. Mr. Williams, Mr. Schauerte, welcome back to the Chamber.
Committee, we last left this activity on page 355, Municipal and Community Affairs, community operations, operations expenditure summary, $2.093 million. Does committee agree?
Agreed.
Thank you, committee. Committee, page 356, Municipal and Community Affairs, community operations, grants, contributions and transfers, total contributions, $135,000. Does committee agree?
Agreed.
Thank you, committee. Page 357, Municipal and Community Affairs, community operations, active positions, 12. Any questions?
Agreed.
Thank you, committee. Committee, page 359, Municipal and Community Affairs, community governance, operations expenditure summary, $2.303 million. Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I see a large increase here in material and supplies in the second category, so maybe I can get an explanation of that increase up to $16,000. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. Minister McLeod. Mr. Schauerte.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. In ‘14-15, as a result of devolution, MACA sought and received permission to reorganize the department with the creation of the community governance unit. So what you see is a reflection here, is the creation of a new unit within the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs that combines the governance area, the property assessment area and the community-based planning area. So, that’s what the increase is attributed to. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Schauerte. Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. No further questions.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. Committee, page 359. Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’m just wondering how complete our community governments are in terms of administrators. Obviously, I think the senior administration officer is a keystone position in all the communities. I’m also wondering: I think there’s been a program put in place recently to try and be more responsive to communities with some of their needs. I can’t remember the name of that program, but if I can get an update on that and whether we’re missing SAOs in many communities and how we’re doing at sort of reducing the turnover and keeping people in place there.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. For that we’ll go to the deputy minister, Mr. Williams.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Certainly, in the whole area of governance we rely on the Accountability Framework. It assists the community governments on identifying where the pressures are and identifies pressures to us as a department that we can react to. That is our key, I guess, activity in that area in terms of community governance. We identify training needs. Certainly, the Member is correct; there has been a lot of turnover at the senior ranks with community governments over the past year where we lost a number of SAOs. We work closely with the School of Community Government in identifying training needs, trying to recruit new people to fill those vacancies and trying to train a local workforce that can work in conjunction with the community governments.
Thanks for that response. The Accountability Framework was what I was thinking of. We’re sort of working on two fronts here. Just on the SAOs, are we complete now? Do we have our SAO positions filled in every community that would have one?
On the Accountability Framework side, when did we implement that and when can we expect an early evaluation of that program?
Just recently we’ve seen a couple of communities that have lost SAOs, so they’re in the recruitment phase. I think Fort Smith just recently recruited a new SAO, so they’re fine. We had resignations in a couple of other communities throughout the Northwest Territories. We continue to work on implementing our SAO training through the LGANT program through the School of Community Government to build capacity in this area. Certainly, it’s something that we work closely with our partners to assist with this with LGANT and NWTAC.
On the second part of the question, implementation of the Accountability Framework, I think we’re well into the implementation. Actually, we’re looking at new tools that we’ll be introducing in the near future of using an electronic mechanism to report for communities to give easy access to report on accountability areas, so it’s going to make it a little easier for them to participate in the program. As far as evaluations, until we get some baseline data, I think after this year we should be able to do a report of the health and status of community governments that we’ll be able to share with Members. It will identify the areas of need and the areas of successes. I think that’s going to be important to have that. I think once we get through the cycle, maybe within this year, I think we probably could look at an evaluation of the program. It’s something that we’re interested in how can we make it better and make it more useful as a tool for community governments.
Thanks again for that information. I wonder, as my last point here, if I could ask the Minister if he could commit to providing an update of where the communities are missing an SAO.
Also, I appreciate the comments on training local people for community government jobs. It would be great to know how many SAOs are from the NWT now and how that’s coming along. I’ll look forward to the evaluation report. That sounds great. Thank you. That’s all I had.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. We’ll commit to getting a list of some of our vacant positions as far as SAOs go. We do have a number of training positions where we have local people training to be SAOs through, I think, the School of Community Government and LGANT, so we’ll supply that information to committee. That way they have good knowledge of who’s being trained and from which communities.
Thank you, Minister McLeod. Committee, we’re on page 359, Municipal and Community Affairs, community governance, operations expenditure summary, $2.303 million. Does committee agree?
Agreed.
Committee, page 360, Municipal and Community Affairs, community governance, active positions. Any questions?
Agreed.
Page 363, Municipal and Community Affairs, directorate, operations expenditure summary, $3.915 million. Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a couple questions here. I’d like to know, first of all, there’s some legislation, I believe, that the department is working on and preparing amendments and/or new acts. One of them I hear is the Cities, Towns and Villages Act and I think the other one is the Property Assessment and Taxation Act. I guess I would just like to know, in general, what legislation is being reviewed. Is there any legislation going to come forward before the end of the 17th, and/or if not, what are the plans of the department for bringing forward legislation in the 18th?
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. For that we’ll go to Mr. Schauerte.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. The two major pieces of legislation that are on our priority list right now include the Civil Emergency Measures Act and the Fire Prevention Act. The department has recently completed work on the legislative proposal and has advanced that through Cabinet to the Legislative Initiatives Committee. We are continuing our work on the Fire Prevention Act and we’re still in a research gathering phase at this time.
We certainly understand that there are a number of other pressure points for municipal legislation including some of the ones being raised by the Member. At this point the department is challenged with resources, including human, and time and financial to allocate to things like research. We don’t anticipate looking at Cities, Towns and Villages or other municipal pieces of legislation or PATA until the 18th Assembly at this time.
Thanks to Mr. Schauerte. If there’s a capacity issue at this point, and we’re talking the ’15-16 budget, so obviously there’s nothing in this budget that’s going to allow for the legislation beyond the Emergency Measures and maybe the Fire Prevention Act. In the 18th, with the budget for the ’16-17 year, are you looking at increasing your capacity and getting more staff so that you can do some of this legislation which has been talked about for quite some years now? PATA, I think we’ve been talking about it for three or four years. Is there a plan to increase the budget so that you can get this work done?
Certainly, the issue of resources is not a new one. I do recall that committee did raise this during the review of our business plan, and while we would have liked to have added additional resources in the legislative area, physical limitations and forced growth prevented us from doing that. We have, however, re-profiled a senior policy position in our department and our unit to be more of a legislative researcher position. Historically, this position would deal with more policy related and perhaps support to the Minister’s office. Those sorts of things. We’ve recognized the need for more dedicated research in the area of legislation and, accordingly, have re-profiled this position to provide more support in that area.
To be honest, it’s more of a “let’s see how we’re doing” phase right now with the resources that we’ve added. We seem to have made progress on both CEMA and the Fire Prevention Act, so we’re confident that we are moving the priorities forward, the ones that are with us right now. We need to have some success in those areas before we can undertake new challenges, so at this point it is our anticipated plan to work within existing resources and see if we can make some headway with what we have right now.
I don’t want to sound too sceptical, but we have been talking about a number of acts, the Property Assessment and Taxation Act, for some time. I certainly hope this brief profiling of a position is going to allow you to move forward on some of the three or four acts affecting municipalities that you haven’t been able to get to. I’ve only mentioned two; I know there are two or three others that don’t come to mind at the moment. It seems to me that our municipalities deserve to have up-to-date legislation that governs them. In my mind, there ought to be a higher priority for the department on bringing this legislation up to date.
I suspect I’ll get the same answer, but my other question has to do with the hotel levy, which has been talked about again for quite a number of years. It was moving along reasonably nicely, I thought, but then it hit a roadblock because somebody objected somewhere. It went back for further research.
Can I get an update on where this is at? Are we going to see any kind of resolution to this possible hotel levy in this 2015-16 year this summer? Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. For that we’ll go to Deputy Minister Williams.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Member is correct; we have been involved with this file for a number of years and it’s not moving as fast as everyone would like. We determined that there are four basic approaches to create a regime where revenues from a tariff on hotel rooms could be collected. Taxes could be created in taxation legislation specific to hotel accommodations levied by the territory with some or all of the revenues remitted back to a municipality either by legislation or policy. Secondly, taxation legislation can be created by a territory for the benefit of municipalities. The third option is a designation marketing fee where hotel operators in the community can voluntarily collect fees and pull them together for a specific purpose.
As recently as last summer or last fall, we did approach the Yellowknife Hotel Association and offered the destination marketing fee as an option to pursue so we didn’t have to go through the legislative route. That was rejected as an option. The Yellowknife Hotel Association has been adamant they want to have this area regulated. So, we are still doing some further research in this area.
Initially we intended to consult with hotel operators and community governments but have deferred this consultation to the beginning of the 18th Legislative Assembly due to our other legislative priorities that were mentioned earlier.
One thing we are willing to do, and for consideration, is to go back to the Yellowknife Hotel Association and make that offer again to seriously look at the designation marketing fee as a valuable option. We are willing to do that to try to move this file forward. If not, it would certainly be a priority when we do municipal legislation under the 18th Assembly. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Williams. Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thank Mr. Williams for the answer, but I’m not very pleased to hear what you have to say. Again, this has been a really long time coming and I guess I would have thought that in four years we would have been able to reach some kind of middle ground to get something accomplished.
I am pleased to hear the department is willing to go back and talk to the hotel operators again. That is something that would get this in place sooner rather than later, but I can understand why the hotel operators want to have something that’s regulated as well. I know that this is not something which everybody in the territory wants. I could see where for the territory to administer the legislation is not the way to go, but certainly to provide for municipalities to put this levy in place if they wanted, I think, is something that’s really doable. I am somewhat dismayed that we haven’t been able to make relatively minor amendments to legislation in order to make it feasible for communities such as Yellowknife to put this thing in place. Just a comment, Mr. Chair. I don’t have anything else to add. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. We’ll just treat that last statement as a comment. The Minister has already replied. Continuing on with directorate for questions, I have Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to add my voice to my colleague’s, Ms. Bisaro, on the considerable disappointment in not seeing any response to the concerns raised in the past. There is an efficient legislative capacity in this department. Initially we were led to believe the limit was in the Department of Justice and when we discovered that it wasn’t, it was actually in the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs, we raised this very solidly with the Minister. The legislation needs only get stronger and perhaps more desperate every day. I am sure the Minister would like to address this. Maybe I will just ask, what does the Minister need from us to get this done?
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Right before committee I think there was support there for our desire to add next an extra person on. As you heard from Mr. Schauerte, we’ve re-profiled one of our positions to help deal with this so we can take care of some of the backlog as far as legislation goes and be as current as possible. We had the support of committee. Again, because of fiscal constraint, we were unable to get the position at this time, so we re-profiled internally. Thank you.
Thanks for that response, but the question was just asked and responded that we are not looking at these acts at this time. We have a capacity issue. That’s at odds with what the Minister just said.
We do have a capacity issue. I think we said that. That’s why we re-profiled a position internally, to help deal with some of the workload. Right now I think we have maybe two people who are dealing with legislation that we have to bring forward. We’ve added another one internally, so that should help us take care of some of the backlog and some of the outstanding legislation. We do have a capacity issue right now, but we’re taking steps to deal with it and hope to be able to move forward once everybody gets up to speed. Thank you.
Thanks for that response. One of the issues that have been also bumbling away for years now is the local improvement charges, the provision of the authority, the capability for municipalities to deal with that and offer that. In its absence, we are, to some degree, adding to the cost of living are not taking advantage of the opportunities. We have to help residents with the cost of living. We are also avoiding, really, the opportunity to help with the cost of renewable energy infrastructure.
As we heard earlier today from my colleague Mr. Moses as he talked about the exceptional front-end costs of installing solar in Inuvik – and this is true of different renewable energy systems – even though the payback time and the internal rate of return is very, very attractive compared to any other investment these days, they are finding it very hard to deal with those front-end costs. This is the sort of thing that municipalities, in concert with this government, could deal with it through the provision of local improvement charges and funds.
So, for example, I am working with some people interested in solar right now and one of them had to drop out of the interest because they’re leaving town in a year and the system won’t be paid back. This would help deal with that. So, the charge would be picked up by the next owner of the home and it’s just a very common sense way to go about dealing with these costs.
What are we doing and when will we provide the legislative, as I understand it, and policy support needed to enable our communities to take advantage of these opportunities to help our residents deal with their cost of living and our larger government goals of energy and greenhouse gas emissions, et cetera? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. For that we’ll go to Deputy Minister Williams.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Member is correct; we do want to help reduce the cost of living in the North. It’s expensive, and any way we can, we have to look at avenues to do so. Under the local improvement tax it is tied to the Cities, Towns and Villages Act, and that’s something that we did say we committed to have a review of that and bring forward in the 18th Assembly. So, there’s a direct linkage to that particular piece of legislation.
Right now residents that do want to make an investment can go to the bank. There are options of going to the regular lenders, to banks to help fund these enhancements to their homes. Certainly having it legislated is probably a good way to go and we are committed to look at that once we start looking at the municipal legislation.
We have 20 pieces of legislation as a department that we’re responsible for and we are making efforts to get them through. Some have been very outdated, like the Fire Prevention Act and the Civil Emergency Measures Act. So we have to set our legislative priorities, and those are, in our minds, more critical for the residents of the Northwest Territories than a local improvement legislation. It’s something that in our priorities we are aware of it, we know the issues. The City of Yellowknife has voiced their opinions on it numerous times and until we get through the Cities, Towns and Villages Act and update our municipal legislation, I think that’s where it’s tied to and that’s where we could make those enhancements. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I hope the Minister is hearing very clearly the frustration at the time it’s taking to get to the Cities, Towns and Villages Act. Obviously, the LICs are one issue of this fundamental piece of legislation that needs consideration. I appreciate the information that people can go to the bank, so I’d like to follow that up with a question.
Yes, that’s a good question that the Member has. I think we’d have to consult with the banks if that’s allowable. I can’t answer that question offhand. It’s more a technical question that would have to go to the lenders. Thank you.
I’ll leave it at that and just say I suspect that the answer is no, or people would be doing that more and that’s why there is such a thing as LICs. But again, we’re talking about the cost of living here and we’re talking about people leaving the North faster than people are arriving in the North. So, I just hope there would be some consideration given to this as a priority to help deal with the real cost of living in the North. That’s all I had, just a comment. Thank you.
