Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the senior officials from Infrastructure, as well as the contractor, and National Defence, are meeting this afternoon to have that discussion. And may I further add that as the Premier's statement earlier mentioned that, you know, she's having discussions with the briefing officials at the highest level of military/security/intelligence branches of the federal government and also met with Minister Anand on the Minister of National Defence, and Minister Vandal as well. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. You know, it's it's really hard to have some positive with this this Minister right now because before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you know, this wasn't even at the surface. This delay has been going on. This is not anything new. And we're only looking at it now because we've been raising the issue. You know, I I Mr. Speaker, with everyone looking at Arctic security, will the Minister use her power to direct her department to stop holding up this important phase to get the contractors on it ASAP and not to delay this project by a year? It's been delayed long enough. Our local businesses need to get to work on this project.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned there's a meeting that's currently underway as we speak at the deputy minister level, and we'll be providing an update on the joint venture once we have concurred on a way forward. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Final supplementary, Member for Inuvik Twin Lakes.
My final supplementary is this: Minister, you know, with the amount of this phase that's been allocated, it's a small amount that needs to be done before the thaw. You know, I know it's cold today but it can change next week. So what I'm asking is this Minister to direct her staff to release that $8 million to get going on this phase that we won't lose a year. The rest of the project, the you know, after the meeting today but will she commit to that today?
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as the Member mentioned, the project came in significantly over budget; more than what the GNWT estimates and more than a third party estimate that used information that was collected by regional contractors. The you know, it's I understand where the Member's coming from. I mean, Inuvik is my community as well and this is something that, you know, we push at the Premier's level, to have that discussion with National Defence so we don't lose the time. So I'm hoping for a favourable outcome today as a result of those meetings. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Kam Lake.
[Remote] Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services.
Some people experience with accessing or working to access support services feel that support services from NTHSSA are at an alltime low and are very siloed in today's environment. Schools are currently trying to find funds to pay outofpocket to secure access to support services like speech language pathology, occupational therapy, but this is incredibly costly.
So will the GNWT work with schools to fund access to support services if it does not have the capacity to deliver those services in house? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Kam Lake. Minister responsible for Health and Social Services.
Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I appreciate the Member bringing this question forward. We recently reorganized speech language pathology to focus on more equitable service delivery for children in age birth to five years old. So we did that knowing that this is a critical period of a child's development and that there are considerable wait times for rehabilitation services, and we wanted to make sure that we could improve the turnaround time for these basic screening tools that practitioners use with this group. So equity is really our concern here, and the refocus of service in speech language pathology is the means that we're taking.
We have high staff vacancy rates in these rehabilitation service areas, and so as a result we have long wait times. The problem is that as with other healthcare professionals, there is a very strong demand for these for these professions and not a very robust workforce and so we, like everywhere else in the country, have experienced a shortage of people in these areas and the result is unfortunate wait times for patients. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. And I appreciate the Minister's willingness to have this conversation together. Today, many schools are fall are finding that they they follow the process to reach out to secure support services within NTHSSA but that they don't necessarily hear back from NTHSSA about the appointments, the timing to wait for them, or the availability.
And so will Health and Social Services commit to service standards for schools so that schools are able to communicate not only with students and families but also understand what is required to access supports for students? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'm not going to be able to make a commitment to service standards knowing that we are shortstaffed and that the answer may be greater spending which we don't have in the budget at this time. But certainly I don't see any reason that people who call and ask for appointments can't receive accurate information about their wait times so that they can make informed decisions about what their next steps are. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker, and I appreciate the Minister's comment. Some of the problem, though, is that without the service standards, some people aren't receiving that phone call back or that email back to let them know that it's going to be a year or a year and a half or two years before a student receives services. So the schools are really unable to make alternate arrangements or alternate plans for the care and the learning and development of that student.
And so will the Minister commit, then, to response service standards for school professionals so that NTHSSA is committing to responding to schools within a certain amount of time so that they can move on to other alternative approaches? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I think that what I can commit to is to learn more about the detail of this area and to consult with my colleague from ECE to sort out how we can handle these requests more efficiently so that parents have a clearer idea sooner in the day about where they stand accessing rehabilitation services. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Final supplementary, Member for Kam Lake.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. And I appreciate that this is a bigger conversation, and I welcome having a larger conversation with the Minister for sure. And one of the things that might be helpful for both schools and residents alike is having a public reporting mechanism where people can really see what the realistic wait times are for different specialty services in the Northwest Territories. And then from there, are able to either make alternate arrangements or look at other interventions in the meantime, especially when it comes to learning and development of students across the Northwest Territories.
So is the Minister willing to commit to public reporting of wait times for NTHSSA specialty services? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I appreciate the question. I know that the department does track wait times in both the Beaufort Delta and through Stanton Territorial Hospital for these specialties, rehabilitation services for children. I am not clear how this information is shared with the public. But I would like to find that out and I, on the face of it, would like to advocate that this information be shared with the public so that people can make appropriate decisions about alternatives. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Great Slave.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my questions are for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
What is considered to be a living wage in each of the communities where childcare is expected, and what is our plan to ensure that childcare providers can pay that wage to workers as part of the subsidized program? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Great Slave. Minister responsible for Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So as most people are aware, we recently signed a deal with the Government of Canada for around $50 million, and that is to help us transition to a system of universal childcare. There are a number of aspects to this. The first aspect that is rolling out across Canada is to reduce fees for parents by 50 percent on average.
The Member raises some good points. There are other issues. Staffing has always been an issue. And in terms of a living wage, we don't have I don't have the stats for living wages in every community. I know that in some of the regional centres, it's around $25 an hour.
Currently, ECE provides retention bonuses or additional subsidies to early childhood staff based on their level of education and so those staff do receive up to $12,000 a year in subsidies from ECE. And starting in the upcoming fiscal year, which is just around the corner, there is going to be an additional retention incentive bonus for all early learning and childcare staff, and that is until we get a wage grid in place so that early childhood educators are recognized for the work that they do and are paid appropriately. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'm glad that the Minister answered my next question so I can have one additional one.
So my next question is with the ongoing housing crisis in the NWT, we have a shortage of day home spaces that are available in several of our communities, as well there may be issues with housing any workers that we may be able to recruit given low wages and not meeting the living wage. How is the department working to remove the barriers in place to create new day home and daycare infrastructure? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And for the past couple years, we've had an early childhood infrastructure fund. It's a million dollars a year. There's been great uptake on that. But the fact is that we need third parties to want to provide childcare. In many communities, there it's already happening Indigenous governments are doing it, nonprofits are doing it. But some of the difficulties in communities without childcare is the lack of a provider, and in other communities there's just no children under the age of five. There's no need for childcare. And yet other communities, they would prefer that their children stay with family members. So there's a number of reasons that some communities don't have childcare facilities, and that may be always the case.
In terms of what we're doing to increase the number of family day homes, now is an opportune time to get the word out there that running a family day home is a good business opportunity. And we are trying to expand childcare spaces and so we want to encourage people to look into that opportunity. We have funding. If you want to become a day home provider to make the necessary renovations, do some of the upgrades that are required, and I believe in the future we're going to start doing more promotion of that because we want more people to get into that industry. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yeah, the Minister raises some other issues that I sort of struggled to wrap my head around.
As we look at this subsidy, one of the things that I've been hearing is that in the communities without licensed daycare spots, a lot of times it's family, it's grandparents, all of that, that are providing the daycare or the services. So to me, it seems to make sense if we could look out a way outside of the box in order to pay family members in those communities so that the communities can actually get some benefit out of this subsidy.
So is the government committed to finding a way to look at different methods of childcare and thinking outside the box as we don't tend to fit that southern Canadian model all the time? And are we going to look at maybe paying grandparents and other relatives to take care of children? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And this has been raised a number of times. And no, we are not going to be exploring those avenues. There has been a desire from some people to have us subsidize more than just licensed centres, so unlicensed centres or family members, but unfortunately we can't be everything to everyone and we have to pick our lane. And so what we're focusing on is early licensed early learning childcare spaces. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions, final supplementary, Member for Great Slave.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it's my understanding that over this weekend that there has been meetings of day home providers, etcetera, to discuss the government's plan. It is my understanding that they are not happy with what is happening with the fee subsidy.
Can the Minister commit to arranging a meeting with those stakeholders in order to hear from them directly what their issues are and perhaps modifying the rollout in order to address their concerns? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Since March, probably March 5th, there's been a number of sessions, a number of meetings between day home providers and staff, and those meetings are going to continue. The difficulty is that, you know, we have a lot of childcare centres and those centres are nonprofits, and they are there to for the purpose of providing childcare. They're not money making ventures. And so they already have the idea that they want to do what they can to make childcare accessible.
And so the family day homes, on the other hand, are they're businesses. And so it's perhaps they have they have some different motivations. And we're asking them to do something for the greater good but it's not necessarily their role as some of them see it. And so there have been some some difficulties. We are trying to work through those. I've asked the department to ensure that we are being as flexible as we can and that we are ensuring that parents aren't going to see any or the parents are still going to see that reduction that we promised, that 50 percent on average. So there's ongoing meetings. There's we're happy to have as many meetings as we possibly can. We want to get the information out. We want open lines in communication, and we want parents to see that 50 percent reduction. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Thebacha.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, according to the budget address for 20222023, business investment for 2020 was down minus 34.9 percent for the NWT.
Can the finance minister tell us what the government's plan is to turn those numbers around and increase business investment for the NWT? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Thebacha. Minister responsible for Finance.
You're on mute.
Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'm going to just confirm that I'm being heard? Okay. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
So I am quite conscious of the fact that there's been a reduction in the GDP over the last couple of years. We've obviously been through the pandemic and certainly in the last two years, that has been the predominant reason for that. Nevertheless, I think everyone's heard me say that we were in challenging times long before the pandemic and that we had to start looking at our economic situation. So I'm happy to have this question. Mr. Speaker, there's a couple of things.
Firstly, there's the mineral resource sector which continues to be one third of our private GDP contribution, and a lot of work is happening on that side to increase investor confidence, to increase awareness of the geological potential that we have, to incentivize early exploration and to incentivize advanced exploration.
There's also, of course, the other side of more general economic development that's going to diversify our industry. And in that regard, Mr. Speaker, just briefly, we have regional economic development plans underway. We have the Tourism 2025, which will hopefully bring back what was a growing sector and a lot of activity in that regard with the borders reopening. And certainly, Mr. Speaker, I'll make note of the fact that we've had very significant capital budgets in the last couple of years signalling that we are going to do as a government what we can to use our financial muscle to make sure that we're moving projects forward and giving access to those projects across the territory, which of course provides opportunity for local contractors to be involved but also builds up some of the infrastructure that we're hoping will then support continued growth and diversification. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, according to our recent budget address, the NWT's real GDP level was minus 10 percent for 2020. In fact, for three out of the previous five years, the NWT has experienced a decline in the GDP growth.
Can the Minister tell us what the government's plan is to reverse course and increase GDP growth for the NWT? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So Mr. Speaker, again, I'm certainly following the numbers as well, and I'm pleased to have an opportunity to speak to them. You know, and again, certainly for the last couple of years, a lot of the impacts were seen largely as a result of what was happening internationally and nationally because of the pandemic. That said, there's there was, again, some preexisting this is particularly within the mineral resource sector which is such a significant contributor to our GDP and which has such a direct impact on the numbers that are being raised here. So the fact that there's been also a very good recovery postpandemic or at least maybe not postpandemic but in the last year or so as the pandemic has evolved and changed, I would hope gives us a good signal that we are going to be on a good track.
You know, as far as what we're going to do going into the future, my last answer I already outlined some of what the government is doing. The final final impacts will depend a lot on what happens in the private sector but what I want to emphasize is to the extent that we have levers that we can pull, whether it's in capital spending, whether it's in other elements of trying to increase investor confidence, whether it's in supporting the small business sector, you know, through the spectrum of everything from BDIC to seed supports, those are all the types of things we're going to be looking at. And there's not one single thing that we need to do; it's all of the things that we need to do. So I'm conscious of that, and I'm happy to have it made reference of it on the floor. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, the finance minister has been promoting the new government renewal initiative as a means to reducing costs for our government.
Can the Minister provide any estimates, any dollar amounts or projection data, which states how much money this initiative will save the government? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the government renewal initiative was never intended to be an expressed budget cutting initiative or government jobs cutting initiative. It has always been an effort to say, you know, that we look at it having an over $2 billion budget and yet continue to see needs, continue to see challenges in various you know, in various programs or services, and so what we wanted to do was to take a step back and say, look, what are we doing with $2 billion that can better align with needs, priorities, values. Are there programs that we know are successful that could use more money and programs that perhaps could be shifted and have those resources directed to areas that are finding more success. So that's always been the intention of government renewal, is that we're bringing that culture of evaluation across departments, that we're bringing the culture of understanding what we do, why we do it, how we do it from the front lines, who are being the folks who do the front lines are being interviewed as part of the government renewal, all the way through to the senior management levels where they too, of course, are being interviewed and participating in government renewal. We're on track. The first step is to just get a real handle on the full inventory of what government does, and then the second step is to do the evaluation process. It is taking a while. Again, we're 11 departments. We're a 6,000 strong public service. But if to the extent that evidencedbased decisionmaking is how we want to make those decisions going forward, this is going to give us the evidence to do that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Final supplementary, Member for Thebacha.
Mr. Speaker, I have heard from many of my constituents about the rising cost of living, the reduced purchasing power for people, and the historic levels of inflation, and it affects all consumer goods. Does the Minister of Finance have a plan to address this issue and help alleviate some of these extra costs for the people of the NWT? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I am quite live to the fact that February 2022 saw an inflation level at 5.4 percent higher than last year. I've certainly been watching inflation not only since 2022 began but since the fall. We've been watching what's been happening geopolitically obviously, as I know everyone has in the last few months, but also even before that with respect to supply chain issues. So, you know, I certainly want to be clear that the Department of Finance is aware of the challenges. We're aware of the financing impacts. We're looking at the impacts also from the perspective of what that's going to do to the government's revenue situation and our expenses, and there was already matters in the mandate to look at the cost of living and the impact that has on residents, the impact that has on businesses.
So having just answered three questions about the growth of the economy and the growth of business, I can't answer those three questions without always keeping in mind that the realities of supply chain challenges, the realities of inflation rising, those things are going to impact on all those other efforts. So, I mean, the plan is really one that is whole of government. The plan is one that is whole of department in that we don't we can't be looking to grow all of these other areas and pretend that we can have economic diversification, economic growth particularly in the small business sector, without knowing that we're going to have to continue to look at what gaps there may be, what funding opportunities we need to be seeking out, whether in partnership with the federal government or otherwise, in order to meet the reality that everyone, from small business to large business to government, are going to be potentially facing some major increased costs over the next year. So I mean, there's not a silver bullet here, Mr. Speaker. I'm not going to pretend that there is. You know, there's a couple of governments who might be giving a few hundred dollars out and for some that might be helpful, and for others that certainly won't be enough. So there's I'm not going to pretend there's a silver bullet, Mr. Speaker, but I want to make everyone very clear and very sure that we are going to be watching this and monitoring this, and as we've done throughout the pandemic, doing our best to fill in the gaps. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Tu NedheWiilideh.
Yeah, thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question is for the Minister of Lands with devolution.
Mr. Speaker, our government assumed increasingly authority for the responsible management of lands in the NWT, including the administration of mining and exploration land use. Would the Minister outline for the Assembly what those responsibilities are? Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Tu NedheWiilideh. Minister responsible for Lands.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'll try to do it from here but it's probably going to miss some few things that we do at the Department of Lands.
As the Member for Thebacha was talking about, we're trying to get the regulations done for the so we can then do the public lands enforcement. We're modernizing the land use only policy, revised project assessment policy. We talked about securities, project assessment. We were working on industry surface review. So we're working out there, land use and sustainability. I'm missing one, sorry. I had it written down here.
We're also doing a review of the securities. We are working with that. We have reached out to the Department of or the Chamber of Mines to coordinate it, and we have one interested company that's specifically asking to do that. We are also doing enforcement. And most importantly, we are trying to deal with rightsbased cabins and unauthorized occupancy, but. And then we also do land use plans working with Indigenous governments and the federal government. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Specific to the Nechalacho project, could the Minister outline the current status of the Nechalacho land use permit? Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I thank the Member for the question.
The department executed a sevenyear industrial lease for Cheetah to support the demonstration mining project on April 23, 2021. Cheetah's now seeking a potential for a 30year lease for mining proposals as they are working towards the mining phase of the project. The department has been working collaboratively with both Cheetah and the Department of Justice to ensure that draft release continues to protect the GNWT for liabilities related to the proposed plan. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It's my understanding that we have we are in the discussions with Cheetah Resources about securing a bankable longterm mining lease. This is an essential requirement for any mining project to ensure it has secure tenure and protect its multimillion dollar investment. Could the Minister advise us on the status of the discussion? Mahsi.
