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.
