Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. Ms. Gault, Mr. Guy and Mr. Lewis, welcome back to the House. Committee, we’ll open up the floor to general comments. With that, I have Mr. Bouchard.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just wanted to make some brief opening comments. Public Works and Services has been working on the shared services and procured shared services and we’ve been trying to work out some of the details on this process. I guess overall I support the concept of centralizing or regionalizing some of this purchasing. You know, in the Hay River area we’ve been able to get some of those positions and do some of that stuff.
I guess I’ve been hearing some concerns, and there are some growing pains of going back to this process. I say “back” because I think the government used to do this a long time ago, centralized purchasing. I guess there are just some growing pains between the link between Public Works and Services and the departments and some of the people supplying the products, whether it be northern manufacturers, which we recently had a meeting with as well as some of the people who supply it. I’ve heard the Department of Health from the people that supply equipment to the health service.
I guess I’m giving a little bit of time to Public Works and Services to deal with the growth and the learning curve of learning these departments and how those people have to learn some of the specialties of the individual departments. I understand there’s a link between the department and shared services, but I’m not sure exactly how that works with the department as far as the specs. Some of these people that have been supplying to the health field have been training some of those departments, some of the health departments, some of the people in the regions that this is what they need, but this is what we provide, this is what’s available, whether it’s a hospital bed or whether it’s a specialized tub. Like, there are a bunch of specs that they need.
So I know there’s a learning curve for shared services to get up to speed on some of the specialty stuff from each department. When we deal with Transportation, for example, of a plow truck, what’s required in a plow truck? Because I think some of the stuff has been there for years as far as the Department of Transportation knows what they want, but now they have to go to shared services and explain that. So there’s a little bit of a learning curve, and if the Minister could just talk about where the shared services is going in learning and getting up to speed in that link between departments and the procurement side of it.
I’m glad to continue to see the deferred maintenance slowly going down. I don’t know the actual number when we started in this Assembly, but I know the number has been going down pretty steadily. So, obviously, we’re happy with the new health centre in Hay River and I think that alleviates some of the deferred maintenance.
Just looking through my notes from the business plans, one of the things was e-waste. I know we continue to look at ways of dealing with the e-waste. I know the government goes through a lot of e-waste and I know we’ve been trying some pilot projects, but I think we just need to commit to fixing it, to taking it on. I know, through my private side, a lot of that e-waste is being shipped south now. I think they’re doing that in Fort Smith. So, I mean, I think the government needs to come in on getting rid of some of that e-waste and not letting it go to the landfill and not letting it go into surplus, because most of the time it ends up in the landfill after a few things have been taken from it. So I think we need to commit, as a government, to getting rid of the e-waste, get a full recycling program going on it. I know Public Works is dealing with a lot of that because they end up with the surplus assets.
The other one that I know Public Works and Services I’ve been trying to send them notes whenever space comes available and decentralization, and I guess if we can get a little bit of an update on where Public Works is doing assessments in the communities, the smaller centres of their office space available. I even recently heard of Simpson, looking at opportunities there for more office space. Where does the department see that going forward? I think the department is one of the key links in decentralization as far as office space is concerned. Obviously, Housing is for housing issues and other departments as far as getting their positions decentralized. So that’s an area of concern, and I know Public Works is engaged with that decentralization.
Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. We’ll turn it over to the Minister for a reply at this time. Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to give a few comments on each of these areas and I’ll have the deputy minister provide some detail.
The procurement shared services from the government’s perspective is something that is very positive. We consider it to be very positive for industry as well. It does consolidate the contracting, tendering and so on. We have offices now in the various locations across the North that handle the procurement services for all of government and all the departments, plus the NWT Housing Corporation. We feel that it’s going to improve the quality of our contracting and our tendering process, something that the government looked and felt was the way to go to bring efficiencies to the government and effectiveness.
The Deferred Maintenance Program, yes, each time we bring new assets into the government and dispose of older assets, our deferred maintenance comes down. We also do major mid-life retrofits on buildings and reduce the deferred maintenance in that way. So, as I indicated in my opening remarks, deferred maintenance, seven or eight years ago, started over $470 million and it’s down to about $270 million. So we are bringing our deferred maintenance costs down, but immediately as we introduce new buildings into the government inventory, the deferred maintenance on that building starts to accumulate until which point we do either a mid-life retrofit or do a replacement.
As far as e-waste with the GNWT itself, Public Works and Services has been dealing with the electronic waste of the GNWT, our own employees, for the past 10 years. We have had relationships with organizations in Alberta. We take all of the computers or any of the electronic waste that comes from the public service and we deal with it. We send it down south. We have an organization down south that deals with our electronic waste. The bigger e-waste program for the general population is going to be something that the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources introduces now as part of the recycling program that is run by ENR.
Specific to office space and housing, I could talk about the amount of market housing that the Housing Corporation is going to put out there in the communities for market housing not necessarily targeted specifically at decentralization but for office space. I will have the deputy minister, if need be, provide a little more detail on these four areas and also some specifics on the office space. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Mr. Guy.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. On the questions around procurement shared services, this is really our first year up and running with procurement shared services fully implemented. It started April 1st of this fiscal year. To date, we have handled approximately 1,250 procurement requests. These are everything from supply arrangements, standing offer agreements, procurement requests and we have awarded contracts of a total value of approximately $209 million to date. So we have been very busy this year. We also had to provide a lot of support to the forest fire season that added to the volume of transactions that we dealt with. So procurement shared services is fully operational now. It’s up and running. As the Minister said, we have staff in regional centres to provide support and to handle regional procurement initiatives.
With vendor engagements and specifications, there were questions around how we handle specifications through procurement shared services. We’re not responsible for developing the specifications through procurement shared services, but what we do is we work with the client department. No specifications are developed by the subject matter experts in the department. …(inaudible)…for example, are developed by the experts in the Department of Transportation. They developed the specifications and we work with them to incorporate them into the tender documents and we had the procurement process. Many of the specifications, we also helped departments with the technical aspects, updating, modernizing them because many of them are dated.
In terms of educating our own GNWT staff, since we have been in place with procurement shared services we have had 70 employee information and training sessions where we trained 700 GNWT employees across government on procurement practices and procurement shared services. That’s how we are working towards improving our internal approach to procurement. On the vendor engagements side, we have held a number of sessions as well. So we’ve worked with the Chamber of Commerce in some regional locations to provide information sessions to businesses and contractors to improve the interest and engagement on government tenders.
Thank you, Mr. Guy. Continuing on with general comments, I will go to Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. My comments will focus around three major things for us in our region. I want to make comments to the Minister. The first one is around Sahtu, which is a stand-alone region within the department, DPW. Our regional office is up in Inuvik. There are plans to have a manager of some type in the Sahtu region. We have employees in the region, yet we still have to call Inuvik, to the higher levels of authority. I want to not only talk to this department but other departments within government. My region wants to become a stand-alone region. With all the challenges our region has, I think it is high time that we stop having other regions take care of us by having the regional office outside of the Sahtu.
I certainly have had an earful from people in my region asking why this still continues today, having our region call outside to do things within our region. I’m looking forward to some type of reason other than to hear reasons why they can’t move positions or create positions in the region. We have to get away from that type of message and say, yes, we can do it, let’s look at it. Is it a possibility? Yes, we can, type of attitude. If it can be done in that direction, I’d like to see it. Hopefully, within the life of this government and the 18th government, the Sahtu becomes a stand-alone region with the proper positions of authority and the proper support from this government to look at a stand-alone region in our area. I want to say that’s a big one for me within DPW.
I want to thank the Minister for working with the contractors in the region on the new health and wellness long-term care facility in the region. I see a little bit of activity happening there now, so it must be that things are happening. I look forward to that project continuing and moving to a place where we would look at cutting the ribbon and having the facility open and see people moved into the facility.
I appreciate the Minister’s effort and the department’s to complete Tulita’s tank farm. It’s working well and I look forward to seeing an overall evaluation, almost an audit on the project. Where did the expenditures go? Did we support the community in having those dollars go into that project? Accommodations, vehicles, and basically how it went. It’s more of a look at the project itself.
I certainly appreciate the new biomass projects going into the communities in the North and the schools in Tulita and Fort Good Hope. I look forward to those biomass projects with the support of the contractors knowing they can do the work in our communities, Norman Wells, Fort Good Hope and Tulita. We have some pretty good contractors and I certainly support our northern contractors being flexible enough to see if they can do the work. I think our government recognizes doing business further north does cost a bit more; however, I think we have provisions in our work that allows for additional cost. Sometimes we need to just be a little more flexible with regard to getting more northern contractors on board. I think it’ll take some negotiation to make that happen. I wanted to say that to the Minister. These are my comments. I don’t have any other comments in the details. I just wanted to make comment to the Minister that I’m looking forward to a time where the DPW’s office and the project are finishing off the new wellness and long-term care facility.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Minister Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have had discussions internally on how the Sahtu region operates in as far as Public Works and Services goes. We would strongly look at placing an area manager into the region. We have other areas where the activity has not been as high as other bigger regions and we have placed area managers into these other areas. An example is Deh Cho. We’ve placed an area manager in Simpson who actually reports to the regional office from the South Slave; however, it becomes quite independent. This is what the Member wants to see, that the Sahtu region become more independent and less reliant on going to other regions in order to get their support.
Right now, we have only 10 PYs in the Sahtu out of I believe it’s 57 total PYs for the Beaufort-Delta/Sahtu regions. Looking at a position as area manager we see as step one giving us a look at how a region could look in the future. As the volumes increase, as the Member said, there have been lots of activities with new schools and now the new health centre, and we’re bringing people down from Inuvik. If the volumes increase in the Sahtu, we could look at the next step of moving to maybe an area manager that reports to Yellowknife or something into the future. Not necessarily going to a regional superintendent but maybe giving an area superintendent with more authority and more independence.
The new health centre and long-term care in Norman Wells. A lot of the material is arriving on the winter road so the activity is picking up. We also are gearing up for very heavy activity in the construction of the Norman Wells Health Centre long-term care facility this summer. The Member should see this building going up fairly quickly this summer. I don’t have the exact schedule with me as where we’re expecting to be. The construction will occur this year, then it will be closed, and then they will be working on the inside of the building, and the building would be substantially completed and ready for occupancy in August of 2016. That’s something that we’re shooting for.
The expenditures on that building and where the expenditures occurred, who benefited from the expenditures is something we can do. We can track that. It’s a negotiated contract.
On the other question about the project that was completed with PPD, a tank through the PPD tank farm, again, we would be able to look at the expenditures. I think the Member is asking that we audit the expenditures and so on, on that project, and we can provide that info.
Comments on the biomass. We are seeing that it may be feasible to have biomass in the Sahtu. We’re looking to turn some of the buildings that exist and putting biomass boilers into, I believe it’s the schools in Good Hope, Norman Wells and Tulita. Then, of course, the new long-term care health centre is also going to have a biomass furnace as the primary heat source.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Next on my list I have Mr. Blake.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just have a few opening comments here. It’s been brought to my attention that the communities that I represent, specifically Aklavik and Tsiigehtchic and even McPherson, would like to see a lot of the contracts that are through Public Works, whether it’s for maintenance or work that needs to be done in the community. In many cases, I see a clause under the contracts that state that it has to be within 50 kilometres of the community, and that’s what the communities would like to see on a lot of these contracts specifically for maintenance. A lot of this can be done within the community and that’s what the leadership would like to see in the future here. It gives opportunities to the people in the community who have small businesses to get some of these contracts here, because that’s something that the people would like to see, is to try to keep some of these funds in the community to give the residents the benefit.
Thank you, Mr. Blake. Minister Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We will look at ways to increase the local content in our contracts in those three communities that the Member represents. There are some as and when contracts as well. We’d look at trying to get as much local involvement as possible. We’re not sure about the geographical restricted tendering process. We have some MOUs in place as larger government with the Gwich’in, and so in addition to that maybe we may not want to do the geographical restricting on the contracts because it also benefits the government to have as much of the as and when’s and the smaller contracts done by local people because of the response time and so on, and we support that and we will look at all ways to increase the local content and those contracting from this department.
Just one more thing. The garage and office space in Fort McPherson. It’s been in the same location for over 20 years now that I remember. It’s possibly even longer. What are the plans to replace that building and have a new up-to-date office space and workshop for the employees?
We are going to have some detail on that for the Member. I just want to give the deputy minister an opportunity to get some of the details here. We usually follow a process ourselves. Public Works is usually pretty up to date on their own warehousing needs and office needs, so I’m sure that if it’s a building that, as the Member indicates, is well over 20 years old, that we have it in the queue for possible replacement or a major retrofit, but we don’t have the details with us, unfortunately, Mr. Chair.
So, if you will get that information for me, is that what he’s saying?
We would be pleased to provide that information to the Member.
Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. Next on my list is Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to welcome the department here today. It’s nice to see some familiar faces.
I do have some general comments, and if I have the time when we get to detail, I might drill down a little bit more.
There are a couple of areas, just as observation, to wet my whistle, so to speak, in terms of department performance in the last year.
One of them is under the procured shared services. This is basically one year under our belt on this consolidation of buying and savings. The concern I have is have we seen any type of significant savings by consolidating this under one roof? It may be a difficult question to answer, but it was one of the pillars or guiding goals of the department in making it a bit more cost effective for the government. So at this stage, if there are any preliminary cost savings for having this consolidation of procurement, that would be of help to this Member here.
The only other comment I have with respect to how the year went, from an MLA’s perspective, as an MLA, of course, if things go astray or off the rails, we are probably one of the first people who get notified as to if there are other issues. One of the common comments that I got from a number of different companies was that they were quite unsure what happened in this last year. We tried to consult with a lot of our stakeholders. Some of the arrangements in the past were that some of the businesses were given a heads-up for RFPs and stuff like that, and during this year some of that did not transpire. Of course, we as a government put our ads out in the paper and everything else. But some of the processes that a lot of the companies had in place, they were given a heads-up that an RFP was coming, “keep your eyes open for it” and everything else. So we may have upset a few businesses out there that may have had a traditional heads-up that RFPs were coming their way. I am assuming it was lessons learned in a lot of cases, that they are going to tune in more as to how we are going to be opening up procurement. But it was an observation that I had to share at this juncture with the department here.
Occupational health and safety has always been a huge part of what I do here to make sure this government has a strong safety culture. Whether we want to answer in general comments or not, I will bring it up in the directorate again, is what strides have we taken to augment our Health and Safety Program, moving it to the next level, which I know there has been a desire to do so from department to department? But quite frankly, Mr. Chair, we know full well that we have had some issues in some of these areas and they end up in the court system, and the courts have been dictating themselves where we are as a government with respect to our safety and safety culture. So, again, any update as to what our progress has been in the last year on occupation health and safety would be appreciated.
With the new energy functions coming up here, and I have spoken in the House under the term of fuel services, which is the old petroleum products division, and I do applaud the department for recently announcing the decreases in fuel in our communities, eight to nine cents respectively. I think that is a marketable goal and attainable success, and I do want to applaud the department for doing that. My question is the transparency around that. How do you come up with those calculations, and how are those calculations derived? More importantly, how transparent is it to the public and Members on how those changes come about and when the changes are the other way, when we start seeing increase? How does this new fuel service division, how will they be communicating with Members of the Legislature as well as members of the public?
We know that there has also been a recent RFP that was issued for the complete replacement of our phone systems. Again, we can talk more in detail when we get to the TSC function. I have been reading anecdotal reports in media that there were going to be significant savings for us to do this, and I have heard things in the media that up to $6 million in savings over 10 years, which I thought was a bit on the high end. But maybe I could get some clarity as to what are the perceived savings in replacing our government phone systems in the long course.
You know, Mr. Chair, for lack of better words, these are just some of my opening observations with the department, and of course, if I don’t get enough reply in general comments I will definitely be posing them in detail. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Minister Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The procurement shared services is a process that I described previously. We received a lot of positive comments from the decentralized tender desk, the regional desk. We intend to continue to monitor the procurement shared services. We believe that we have increased the quality of tendering. We work with all of the departments. We will be doing internal audits on the procurement shared services so that if there is anything that we think we could improve on in this type of procurement, we will do it.
The occupational health and safety, I will have the deputy minister provide a little more detail.
Energy functions we have done for many reasons that we talked about. We have the conservation, the developing of the policy, the programs, energy programs for the communities and for businesses through the Arctic Energy Alliance. Again, if the Member is wanting to get more specific details on the energy, the consolidated energy division, then we will have the deputy minister provide that.
Fuel services is posted how we come up with our prices. Whether or not we are going to determine buying forward, if we think it is the thing to do, there is a certain price of fuel… Right now we could determine what we would pay if we bought fuel for July, as an example. We would go to a company and buy fuel for July, and if that fuel… It’s called hedging, as the Member knows. So we can hedge up to 70 percent of our fuel purchases for what the government purchases. It’s something that we have our people watching the price go up and down and what the rack price is for fuel when we purchase it, when we ship it in and so on. It’s quite a complex process, but we post it, how our prices come about. If we think the prices need to be brought down in the future, we will bring them down. If we think the prices need to be brought up, we will bring the prices up. It’s all on the fact that we don’t profit on the prices. It’s the cost of the product, the transportation of product and community distribution. Of course, our staff that are needed to purchase the fuel and get the fuel into the communities are all charged to the fuel price that we sell at the end.
After the deputy minister provides some more detail, I will have the director, Ms. Gault, provide the information on the new phone system, including what we think the savings will be. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. I’ll go to Mr. Guy.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. The issue on the tender of the procurement shared services, one additional thing that we are doing is we are working with the Department of Finance on the procurement modules under the financial system. Those modules have a feature in there that will allow for vendor registration, so all the vendors that we do regular business with, or business that are interested in government contracts or tenders will be able to register through that website and they’ll get automatic notification of upcoming tenders, addendums and other matters related to our procurement. We are looking to see that as a significant improvement in making people aware. Because in addition to posting on the website, as we do now, and putting it in the newspapers, this is an enhanced form of providing notification to vendors. So that’s a new feature that will be available going forward.
On OHS we have quite a bit of activity in the department, and in OHS we are working closely with Human Resources on the work they’re doing, the Department of Human Resources. Also, we’ve done a lot of work internally to ensure that our managers have completed the supervisor training modules through the Northern Safety Association sponsored by WSCC. We have developed a lot of material. In fact, we have developed material that has now been adopted by WSCC and the Safety Association for asbestos management for all of our projects which we do and available to all the contractors and other governments and individuals involved in working with asbestos.
We have done a lot of work for our front-line trades folks on fall protection training and confined space entry training. An area that is emerging for both ourselves and the Department of Health that we have put a lot of effort into, both in the new facilities and the existing health facilities, are managing issues and OHS around infection control in health facilities. We have trained 68 of our staff members in that area. Our workplace and general purpose office space, we have made sure we have all the standard First Aid training, CPR training that we need.
We’ve also been working closely with the Northern Safety Association to look at how we can improve our relationship on safety with the contractors and the contracting community to make sure that the safety requirements are incorporated into the contracts that we put to work on the government facilities.
We also have our regular joint occupational and health safety committees for each PWS worksite in the department. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Guy. I will go to Director Gault to talk about the phone system. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. With regard to the new phone system, the current system is almost 30 years old and is very close to it its end of life. The current contract with the GNWT ends in the fall of 2016. So, we did the business case to look at our options, and it was determined that we could foresee increasing costs to replace phone sets and make changes of moving the phones around, et cetera. Those costs were only going to continue to increase.
The new system will run over the GNWT data network, and the hardware costs are dramatically reduced, the long-distance cost will be reduced. The system will be supported by the TSC, so we will be able to do those internal moves within our current staff. So, all of these contribute to an approximately $6 million savings over 10 years. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Director Gault. Next I have Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just have a few brief comments. I know there has been a transfer of energy, $6.1 million into this department, which is significant. I am looking forward to discussing this. I am sure there is forced growth, yet those seem, relative to those amounts, a modest increase. In other words, probably a net decrease to the department’s budget in a sense. I am curious about that.
I wonder if I could just get a general comment on carry-overs and how we are doing with that with our infrastructure, specifically maybe how climate change is rearing its head. I know about some shipping issues with the Mackenzie River low water levels and so on and how those are being handled and a general sense of what the costs are becoming as we deal with that. That’s it. I am going to reserve any detailed comments for later. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The details on the increase being lower than the amount of money we’ve got from energy, the consolidation of energy services. I’m going to have Director Lewis give the details on the ins and outs. Like the Member indicated, it was a bit of a net decrease once you consider we had an increase in the collective bargaining and then we took on the energy function at $6.1 million, but the overall increase was lower than that. So we’ll have that explanation.
We don’t have the details on carry-overs. All of the carry-overs are based on capital items. So we can provide the anticipated surplus for O and M, but we don’t have carry-overs for the capital with us.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Carry on.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So, the Public Works and Services capital, if that’s what the Member is referring to as opposed to capital in general, we handle a lot of the construction for most of the departments. If the Member is looking for just carry-overs on PWS projects, we can probably provide that information.
Climate change, yes, we agree that did have some impact on the shipping this year. Water levels were extremely low and could possibly be attributed to that. We try to get our product in very early. Generally as soon as the waterways are ready for shipping, we try to get our product in, so we have a very good working relationship with the shipper. We have a price that’s probably a very competitive price for shipping our products in. We try to get our products in as early as possible. In the last shipment that was unable to go past the ramparts, we did have some product there, some fuel. However, it wasn’t essential fuel. We were just putting some surplus fuel into one of the communities and maybe some surplus fuel in other communities. There was an impact on private companies where their fuel didn’t get all the way up the river, but not on our fuel services at the department.
Maybe I will have the deputy minister provide some... No, first I will go to Director Lewis to talk about the ins and outs to come up with the moderate increase that we had in our overall budget. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Director Lewis.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Without going into too much detail, at the end of the day the change was about $1.8 million in target reductions that we’re netting off of that. On the plus side, we had about 1.9 million to do with asset inventory adjustments in maintenance, costs associated with that; there was about another $1.5 million to do with utility increases; and part of the energy money coming over, while there was $6-some-odd-million that was transferred, there were some sunsets as part of that funding. At the end of the day, we netted out at an increase of about $5 million over our previous year’s main estimates. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Lewis. Where are we going? Deputy minister.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. In terms of carry-overs for our own PWS capital, I think this year was probably going to be one of our lower years for us in terms of carry-overs. Many of our projects are coming to completion and the carry-overs have been a little bit less than typical on our PWS projects.
On our client-managed capital, I expect the carry-overs on the projects will be similar to previous years, maybe a little bit lower, but we are just at that point right now in the fiscal year where we’re starting to calculate those and provide that information to the Department of Finance to forecast. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, deputy minister. I think there’s clarification for you, Mr. Bromley, about whether you are talking about PWS capital or the overall GNWT capital. Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thanks for all the response. I am happy with that. I didn’t express it well, but I was interrelating whether climate change impacts were having an effect on carry-overs. I think we are starting to get at it: the water levels on the river, the smoke has had an effect on some construction in Yellowknife, delays with the highway shipment and so on. Those sorts of things that, as the Minister said, are not known to be climate change but certainly very consistent with it and possibly related. I think I started to hear a response there. Sorry for the confusion. If there are any more comments, great, but that’s all I had for now.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Deputy minister.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. With the clarification, I understand. None of the particular projects we are managing had a significant impact around delayed barge schedule, or any shipment of materials for projects were not impacted last fiscal year or the work that we have underway right now. As the Minister said, on the marine resupply side and low water, we do work our hardest to get our order of magnitude in early. For example, for this shipping season, order of magnitude has already been placed with the carrier, so they can make their plans and plan the shipping schedule and get our stuff, our fuel delivered early into those communities that will most likely be most impacted by low water.
Thank you, deputy minister. Next on my list I have Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I am just going to touch on a few things I raised in the past couple of weeks. One was the delivery of fuel to the small communities. One Member may have asked, but have the tenders gone out and is the fuel being delivered as we speak? Is the purchase as anticipated? Hopefully that means the communities will get cheaper fuel for the upcoming year.
As well, I was wondering about the RFP for the Fort Simpson Health Centre planning study. I was wondering about progress on that front. Generally, I raised in the House about Nogha Enterprises building a new office space, potentially breaking ground this summer. I wonder if the department has had contact with them to discuss current and future office needs in Fort Simpson. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. Minister Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. We have two communities in the Deh Cho that we are delivering fuel to. Nahanni Butte diesel fuel is currently 25 percent complete. The diesel order is about 384,000 litres. We’ve delivered 98,000 litres. In Trout Lake the diesel fuel is 55 percent complete. The order is about 140,000 litres of diesel, and we’ve delivered 62,000 litres of diesel and 49,000 litres of gasoline. We haven’t delivered any of the gasoline that was ordered into Nahanni Butte yet, but we aren’t anticipating any problems at all delivering all of what was ordered.
Mr. Chairman, with that, I will just have the deputy minister talk about the RFP and the office space and Nogha Enterprises. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Deputy Minister Guy.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. We are aware of the initiatives about the proposed office space development. We are looking at our needs right now in that community and how it would fit into our existing leases. We have been working with them and talking to them. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, deputy minister. Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am pleased they are moving forward and beginning the dialogue. I think if they can go further and identify some office space they need for the future, that will go a long way in firming up that project. As well, I think I asked about the RFP on the Fort Simpson Health Centre planning study, Mr. Chair. Thank you.
Thank you. Deputy minister.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. My understanding is that RFP is out for bidding right now. It’s out to tender and I believe it closes on March 20th. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
