Julian Morse

Thank you, Madam Chair. The comments are certainly brief.

Madam Chair, Bill 12, Business Day Statute Law Amendment Act, received second reading in the Legislative Assembly on October 30th, 2024, and was referred to the Standing Committee on Government Operations for review. On February 10th, 2025, the standing committee held a public hearing with the Minister of Justice and completed its clause-by-clause review of the bill. I thank the committee for their efforts in reviewing this legislation. Individual Members may have additional comments. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. What the Minister shared there was quite vague. What I'm trying to get -- what I'm trying to narrow in on is what problem are we trying to solve. What are the issues in our workforce that we're trying to solve? Is it the fact that, you know, employment at the mines has only reached about 40 percent northern over the years? Like, are there specific issues we're trying to address with this goal; do we even know? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you for those answers. So maybe I'll turn to some of the targets in the business plan. And just want to say, you know, I do appreciate that they've established targets. This is something that I raised during the last review. I guess my comment now is, you know, the targets are still -- I guess vague isn't the right word. But I'll give an example.

So our target for implementation of the post -- for post-secondary is to increase post-secondary students from 569. So having a target like that means that we will achieve our goal if we have 570 students in post...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Sorry, I wave off my wave.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And, I mean, I guess what I would say in response to that is that the difficulty is -- I'm not necessarily looking for documents per se. I don't think that staff time is necessarily best spent kind of just producing plans and reports all the time, but the problem is that if we don't know what we're trying to achieve, it's very hard to define for the people trying to achieve it what success is going to look like and what they should be working towards. So I guess I've got to come up with some Member's statements to talk about this a bit more because -- but the bottom...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just give me a sec here to find -- okay. Yeah, I just wanted to note that there doesn't appear to be any substantial growth in this area of the budget, the labour development and standards area generally. However, a number of goals in the business plan, and certainly the mandate of this government, speaks to increasing workforce, and I could go through the process of listing off a bunch but I'll ask questions about business planning in a sec.

Can I just ask the high level question first, you know, how is this division supporting the priorities of this mandate...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And the way it's described in this -- in the budget is funding to organizations to deliver literacy programs. So what organizations specifically are losing out with this cut?

Okay, thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you to staff, that does help me better understand that. So the $46 million that we see on the other page is contained within the $51 million so it's not a cumulative number. Yeah, okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And that is the only question I had on this page. Thank you.

No one thinks any less of you for it, Mr. Chair.

So knowing that we've got a number of years left, I feel like it's very obvious to point out that we're in 2025, and yet the funding has been completely cut. And so if the transformation is not scheduled to be complete for another two years, what is going to be funding the transformation and how are we going to be successful? How is the Minister ensuring that we are setting this institution up to succeed this time knowing that we already missed the rollout date of 2025 that was supposed to happen? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That's all the questions I have for this section.