Thank you, Member for Great Slave. Recognition of visitors in the gallery. Honourable Premier.
Mr. Speaker, I want to recognize one of our Pages here today, a constituent of Range Lake riding, Ms. Brenna Willis. I think this is a couple of times she has been here, now. Welcome to the House. Thank you.
Thank you, Honourable Premier. Recognition of visitors in the gallery. Member for Kam Lake.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to welcome one of my constituents here today. Her name is Belinda Formaniuk. She is a grade nine student at Sir John, and she likes dogs, music, and reading, but I think she likes us more because this is her second time Paging for us. Thank you.
Thank you, Member for Kam Lake. Recognition of visitors in the gallery. Member for Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to recognize Molly MacKinnon and her mother. Thank you for visiting us here today.
Thank you, Member for Yellowknife North. Recognition of visitors in the gallery. Member for Frame Lake.
Merci, Monsieur le President. I want to recognize a couple of Pages, Monika Kunderlik and Riley Hans. They have Paged with us before, and I know they are very attentive to all of their duties, and I want to thank them for all of their help in the House this past week. Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Frame Lake. Recognition of visitors in the gallery. If we have missed anyone in the gallery today, welcome to the Chamber, and I hope you are enjoying our proceeding. It's always nice to have an audience with us in the House. Mahsi. Item 6, acknowledgements. Colleagues, today is the birthday of one of our Members. Please join me in wishing Minister Paulie Chinna a happy birthday. Also, I was told she was wishing for all the questions today. Just kidding.
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Masi, Mr. Speaker. [Translation] When I talked earlier, I mentioned about alcohol and addiction, how to do treatment for people. [Translation ends] The first question I have is: what programs are currently in place here in the Northwest Territories to provide addiction treatment and addiction recovery care? How many programs are there in total? Masi, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Monfwi. Minister of Health and Social Services.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today, I would like to talk about the Mental Wellness and Addictions Recovery Action Plan that supports the priorities of this 19th Assembly by increasing the number and variety of culturally respectful, community-based mental health and addictions programs, including after-care. I would also like to address the Member's question on what are the types of programming that we have for mental health and addictions.
We have a number of programs, Mr. Speaker, including the Community Counselling Program. We also have the Northwest Territories helpline. We have facility-based addictions treatments. We have the On-the-Land Healing Fund. We also have a program for family violence shelters. We have a "What Will It Take?" family violence campaign. We also deliver prevention-promotion workshops, including mental health, first aid, and applied suicide intervention skills training; also, "Talking About Mental Illness."
I was strictly referring to addiction treatment and addiction recovery care. However, I will move on to the second question, on-the-land treatment programs. How many on-the-land treatment programs do we currently have in the Northwest Territories and where are they located?
The Department of Health and Social Services delivers the On-the-Land Healing Fund in partnership with Indigenous groups. This budget is approximately $1.8 million a year. It supports community development facilities focused on mental health and addictions. The Member asked which locations, and I can get back to the Member on the location of the on-the-land healing programs.
Since we do not have an actual treatment centre here in the Northwest Territories, I would like to know the costs over the last 10 years. How many clients have we sent to the southern institutions, and how much did that cost this government?
I will commit to get back to the Member on exactly the numbers that he is requesting. I apologize. I don't have that with me right now, so we will get back to the Member on the numbers.
Thank you, Minister. Member for Monfwi.
Masi, Mr. Speaker. Obviously, I would appreciate all the detailed information that the Minister will be providing. My fourth and final question is: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission call to action has 23 calls upon all levels of government, including the territorial government, to increase the number of Aboriginal professionals, retention of Aboriginal professional healthcare, and also training for all those health professionals. Do we currently have in place all these areas of interest that have been highlighted as part of the calls to action in our communities, in our 33 communities, Mr. Speaker? Masi.
I don't have that information at this time. However, I will note that the department provides a number of services and supports for mental health and addictions, including child and youth care counsellors, facility-based addiction treatment, psychiatric care and treatment, the Northwest Territories helpline, and the partnership with the land-based Indigenous groups. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Nunakput.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have questions for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment. What is the Minister's reaction to the findings of the audit, and in these findings, what concerns him the most? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Nunakput. Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When I first took over this portfolio, I soon after became aware that we would be receiving a report of the Office of the Auditor General. Personally, I was happy to have this at the beginning of my term because, as a former Regular Member, I was on the committee that looked at these reports and I know how valuable they are.
I am happy to have the information. I wish I could say that it was a glowing audit. It wasn't scathing, but it obviously shows that we are not doing as well as we would like and that we can do better. There are certain areas that are more concerning than others, mainly because we made progress in some areas that have happened since the report. For example, the languages; we have done much since the Auditor finished the report that wasn't reflected in there.
There are things like the graduation rate, which was mentioned earlier. There is no universally accepted way to calculate graduation rates, but you never want to see something that shows that you are not graduating half your population. There is nothing in there that I can say is shocking to me. I have been a Member. I have talked to people in the community. I hear the concerns about education. We are very concerned. We are developing plans to move forward.
I want to also state that the Member noted that we are treating our students no better than cows to a slaughterhouse. I just wanted to comment that, when a student goes into a classroom, teachers treat them much better than cows to slaughter. We have a dedicated staff. We have about 800 teachers in the territory. I want to let them know that I support them and I support their efforts. Going forward, I am going to make sure that we hear from them and we hear how to make these things better. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Let's just get this straight, too. I support my staff in the communities, in my riding, and across the territory. I sat on the education committee in my home community of Tuktoyaktuk for the last three-and-a-half years, and I support them. I support my youth, my youth who ECE is failing. It is not this Minister's fault. It is prior. At the end of the day, the department has to be committed to adopting a more accurate method in getting graduation rates in the NWT, to get more information broken down by the riding. That is all I am asking for. We have our haves and have-nots in our ridings. In the small communities, we are have-nots.
The thing I love about education is everyone is committed. I know that the Member is passionate about education. I just want to reiterate my support for our teachers, as well.
The department has looked at the methodology they use to calculate graduation rates, and we have made a change that more accurately reflects what you would call a true graduation rate, even though there really is no such thing. Different jurisdictions use different rates.
For the territory, we have a lot of in-and-out migration. We have a small population. There is nothing that suits us perfectly. We tried looking at other graduation rates around the country. When we applied them to our situation, some groups of our population were graduating at over 100 percent. Clearly, it is not a cookie-cutter approach. We have created a method now that more accurately reflects, I think, the number of students we have graduating.
To the Member's point about this data collection, we have also created a framework regarding this data collection. We are going to begin reporting yearly on a lot of these indicators. I know that this is the second report, and the first report made lots of comments about the lack of data. This one makes those notes, as well. I have to say that we have come a long way in 10 years, and we have even come a long way since the work on this report was completed.
We now have a lot of that data that we did not have before. The thing we have to do now is analyze it and figure out exactly what it is telling us. Education is difficult because you can have the best teacher and you can have the best facilities in a class, but there is a lot going on outside that classroom. There is a lot going on in students' lives. It is hard to say, "This program, is it helping students effectively?"
Those are the kind of things that this data is going to help us with. We are going to develop our program so that we know that it is working, so that we can do a better job serving our students.
Education is key to our success in our territory and to our people and to our youth, because our youth are our future. Will the Minister make a commitment to the Assembly to provide a draft copy of the department's implementation plan in advance so the standing committee can have a public hearing?
The process with these reports is that the department develops an action plan, which it then provides to the standing committee prior to the public meetings that are arranged between the standing committee and the Office of the Auditor General. I guarantee that the committee will have a draft prior to that meeting.
Thank you, Minister. Final supplementary, Member for Nunakput.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you, Mr. Minister, for that response in regard to the advance notice on public hearings. Is the Minister prepared to take a closer look at social passing and consider ending this damaging practice where we are setting up our students for failure on social passing in the small communities across the territory? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
The term "social passing" is a bit of a misnomer. Students aren't passed into the next grade. They are placed in the next grade. If they don't achieve, if they do not get the credits, if they don't do the work that they need to pass, they do not pass. They are placed in the next grade with their peer group, and they have lesson plans that are adjusted in order to meet that.
I am not going to commit to eliminating social passing because, right now, there is no requirement for a student who doesn't achieve a certain level to be placed in the next grade. That is a decision made by the administrators, by the teachers, and by the school after they have a conversation. Every parent and student has a right to remain in a grade. If a parent and his teacher feels like the child needs to stay in grade 4 or 5 for a second time around, then that is their right. They can have that conversation, and they can do that.
What I do commit to is working to better prepare students so that this doesn't become an issue. If we focus our efforts on early childhood and we ensure that students don't fall behind, we ensure that, when a student comes out of JK, kindergarten, grade 1, grade 2, and they are at those levels, we are not going to have to worry about social passing anymore because they are going to have the skills and ability to pass on their own merits. That is what I commit to. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Hay River South.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The questions I have today are for the Minister of ITI and Infrastructure. Yesterday, I made a statement on the economy. The reality is that, outside YK, the government is the economy. My first question to the Minister is: what is your department's plan to put our northern businesses and residents to work as soon as possible? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Hay River South. Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Premier will be formally introducing our government's mandate during this session. I do not want to get ahead of the process and speak to it is content in any detail today. However, I can confirm that our mandate will lay out actions and investments to address the priorities that we have identified. Those include more jobs, more business opportunities, and growth and diversity for our economy.
Our mandate includes initiatives that are aimed at increasing employment in small communities; increasing resource exploration and development; ensuring government procurement and contracting maximizes benefits to residents and businesses; increasing economic diversification by supporting economic growth in and outside the non-extractive sectors; and setting regional diversification targets; and we are going to adopt a benefit retention approach to economic development. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I thank the Minister for that answer. The second question is with respect to the BIP policies. What will your department, ITI, do to ensure that our current BIP policies are doing what they are designed to do, with respect to the application of them, fairness, and monitoring, to ensure that our northern businesses and residents are really benefitting from them?
The Government of the Northwest Territories Business Incentive Policy and the Northwest Territories Manufactured Products Policy are designed to ensure that government purchases are made through Northwest Territories-owned businesses and to leverage our government's purchasing power into investments in the Northwest Territories' business and manufacturing sector.
After speaking with stakeholders the last several months, I recognized that there is a need to improve upon the Government of the Northwest Territories procurement and the Business Incentive Policy. The Departments of ITI and Infrastructure are working to address this and are looking for areas in which we can strengthen the government's procurement processes. We continue to offer training to increase awareness of our contracting opportunities and of the procurement process. In fact, workshops were held in January in Norman Wells, Tulita, and Hay River.
We have committed to a review of procurement generally and the BIP specifically. It will be an opportunity to put everything on the table and to find a solution together. ITI is currently considering the process and results of past BIP reviews and will develop some options for how best we can move such an initiative forward.
The next question has to do with payment to contractors. We find that, in talking with a number of contractors, they have been waiting for payment for up to five, six, seven, eight, nine months. What I would like to ask the Minister is: what will your department do to ensure that our northern businesses are paid in a timely manner for work done? Just so that we can avoid financial hardship and that we're putting them under.
I do acknowledge that prompt payment of invoices is really critical to our small businesses in the North. We do have a government set of standards and expectations for the payments of these invoices, but I do acknowledge that that system is not always working properly.
The Financial and Employee Shared Services division of the Department of Finance is responsible for processing and issuing payment for all supplier invoices for goods and services provided to all Government of the Northwest Territories departments, including the Housing Corporation and health authorities. As the Minister of Infrastructure, I can tell you that it is an individual department's responsibility for managing the contracts, which includes timely processing of invoices for payment by our finance department.
If this is an area that the Member feels is lacking, and I have heard from others that it may be, I think that we need to look into including information on the payment terms and that process with our regular workshops that we are doing on procurement, so I will commit to including that in the next set of workshops.
Thank you, Minister. Member for Hay River South.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Another area is the red tape. I think that contractors find that the amount of paper that is required to be filled out for payments, and for other areas, as well, is starting to increase to the point where they actually have to hire somebody to manage that. Yet, there is no opportunity to recoup that.
I would ask the Minister if her departments are looking at the paperwork and requirements they put out to contractors and whether there is something that they can do to reduce that amount of paper requirement. Thank you.
As the Members are probably aware, one of the reasons that I ran for office was my own frustrations with some of the red tape and inefficiencies that I saw in the Government of the Northwest Territories. Now, sitting on this side of the table, I can appreciate that it is a lot larger vehicle to steer and change course on.
I do acknowledge that there are issues generally throughout the entire Government of the Northwest Territories with red tape. It has been a conversation that we have all been having as a larger group, as well as within Cabinet. All I can say is that it is one of the commitments of our 19th Assembly to streamline our processes, to get more efficient, and one of the ways that we will be doing that is to be looking for stakeholder feedback and then putting those messages into our processes going forward. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Deh Cho.
Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. As the Minister of Infrastructure is aware from my opening statement regarding the transmission line from the Taltson Hydro to my community of Fort Providence, I just wanted to raise a fact that I just looked at.
The cost of transmission power in Fort Smith is currently at 23 cents a kilowatt hour. When I was there in 2006, it was 17 cents a kilowatt hour, and they were able to put electrical baseboard heaters in units without having to deal with diesel appliances, the furnaces, and stuff. In my community of Fort Providence, we're on diesel. We are on a diesel plant, and before the territorial subsidy rate, which is about half, covers it, the rate in Fort Providence is 84 cents a kilowatt hour.
There is a significant difference there before the government rebates come on. We are paying pretty high, and the government is on the hook for paying all of that, too, because they are subsidizing the whole territory for power. Like I alluded to, there's no watchdog. There is nobody actually talking to our own power corporation, the NTPC, either, about what they're doing to help the territory save on power. That's my concern there.
Anyway, getting back to the transmission line to Fort Providence, can the Minister provide an update on the initiative to run the line into Kakisa and Fort Providence? Mahsi.
Can the Member please direct -- you mentioned Infrastructure, but it sounds like Public Utilities Board? Minister of Infrastructure.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. You're correct. Some of this does lie in other Ministers' departments. However, I can provide the Member with an update on the Kakisa transmission line, Fort Providence to Kakisa. It is a key initiative of our 2030 Energy Strategy. It roughly represents about 15 percent of our total reduction target for electricity generation. The proposed $52-million project involves the construction of the 170-kilometre line from Taltson to Fort Providence, Kakisa, and Dory Point. The extent of the project is to use the surplus hydroelectric power from the Taltson system, the existing system, to virtually eliminate the use for diesel generation in the communities. There will be still emergency backup that would be diesel-generated.
The delivery of hydro power to the customers in these communities should eliminate about one million litres of diesel consumption each year and will help us reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. This project is one of the best projects that we have under the 2030 Energy Strategy in terms of greenhouse gas reductions, and without it, the Northwest Territories cannot meet its commitments that we have made.
The Government of the Northwest Territories has already set aside its 25-percent share towards the funding of the project, and we will be seeking 75-percent funding through the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program this year. There are over $250 million in federal funding allocated to energy projects in the Northwest Territories over the next 10 years under the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program. The Government of the Northwest Territories must apply separately for federal approval for each individual project. The proposed routing for the transmission line is to follow the highway from Hay River to Fort Providence, with an extension into Kakisa and the Dory Point area. The Government of the Northwest Territories will be initiating appropriate engagement and consultation activities on this project in early 2020. Once consultation has been initiated, the Government of the Northwest Territories will apply for federal funding under the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program, we will undertake the environmental baseline work, and we will undertake the detailed engineering design and costing.
