Caroline Wawzonek

I suggest that go to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment, please.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Member actually has foreshadowed my response, which is that it is an ongoing issue. It's not a new problem, but it's one that certainly does involve EIA and the Premier as well as the Minister of Justice. To some degree, there may well be a role for the Department of Finance. Certainly, there are funding considerations here. Mr. Chair, perhaps what I'll do is ensure that we take that away and provide a written response to the Member that better reflects the conversation that needs to be had by all the departments. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I also came from the private sector before I arrived here. This is the longest I've spent working in the government, other than a stint when I was about 20 years old as an intern. I do also take seriously the situation that is being faced by the private sector right now. That said, Mr. Chair, let me go through a number of the other items that I heard.

Increasing government employment. Again, Mr. Chair, it is very difficult to fight a pandemic when you are redeploying staff who have other jobs to do. The money that we received from the federal government was not money that...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, today we have the deputy minister of Finance, Sandy Kalgutkar, and Jamie Koe, deputy secretary to the Financial Management Board.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. They are being allotted a regional way in order to try to help cover off some of the communities that are in need. Right now, to my knowledge, it is the North Slave, Tlicho region, the Deh Cho, and Sahtu that are likely to receive these positions. Thank you.

Again, I am very confident the department is listening carefully to the ideas that are coming through on the floor. However, as far as coming up with new streams of funding, I can also say quite confidently that the Minister of Finance does not want me to make commitments around funding, short of using my due diligence to do that. I will go back. We will put some due diligence to it, see if there are some other options here. There certainly are funding options right now through COVID, and I realize it's not a perfect system. Nothing is. Everyone is doing the best they can with what they have...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. As I had noted last week, we are committed to doing an internal review of the SEED policy, and included within that will be the market disruption clause. The larger communities versus the smaller communities in different regional centres have different views on whether or not market disruption is beneficial or necessary, with those opinions going very strongly one way or another. In the middle of a pandemic is not an opportunity to wholesale change that, but that is why there is the COVID-related stream that doesn't have the market disruption clause in it so that for...

The longer-term strategy for small businesses, I'll refer, again, to the fact that we had fast-tracked the procurement review. To that extent, I want to be very clear that it's my intention that that review engages those small businesses directly, engages the chambers, engages Indigenous governments, Indigenous development corporations, really looks broadly at what it is that we need to do to support the business community in all of its facets here in the Northwest Territories. Again, ensuring that we have interim measures in place before January, but also then is engaging for COVID related...

I think I'm going to speak perhaps with my Department of Finance hat on, as well as with ITI. Really, I suppose it's a whole-of-government response that is going to be required in light of the question, and certainly, to the extent that Procurement Shared Services, which now falls under Finance, is responsible for managing and supporting those contracts. Indeed as far as Procurement Shared Services goes, for all of its client departments, it has not only the Department of Infrastructure, but all client departments. I'm sure they will do their very best to work with the client departments and...

Madam Speaker, one of our government's guiding principles is to ensure that the expenditure of public funds maximizes economic benefits to Northerners and supports northern business. This is consistent with our long-standing commitment to support Northwest Territories businesses and grow a strong, diversified economy.

We put that commitment into practice through the Business Incentive and Manufactured Products Policies, which help ensure that government purchases are made from, or through, Northwest Territories-owned businesses wherever possible, and to leverage this investment back into our...