Statements in Debates
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to join in and thank retired Chief Superintendent Wade Blake for his many years of northern service. He has dedicated himself in an excellent manner. At the same time, I’d also like to recognize our incoming chief superintendent, Ron Smith. I really appreciate the dedication and service both gentlemen have offered Northerners. They continue, as in Mr. Blake’s case, serving Northerners working for the Department of Justice and Mr. Smith works now serving Northerners in his new role. I want to say thank you to both of them for their fine service and certainly...
Thank you, Mr. Chair. That still doesn’t change the principle of the question, which is if somebody takes a loan through the loan program, goes and gets an education and they say to themselves if I’m only going to pay 2 percent interest to come back to the Northwest Territories regardless if its 2 percent, zero percent, 1 percent, I don’t really care, to be frank, low, low, and that’s the point. They say, well, I can get a job elsewhere. Well, it’s almost like it’s free money. So they choose to go elsewhere. That’s the issue.
The whole idea of the loan program is get people to come back and...
Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m just going to follow up and it’s very specific to the issue before us at this second, but I’m going to follow up on a matter that I raised in committee some time ago. Still, to my knowledge, I have yet to receive either a letter or any type of correspondence to that. It directly relates to the SFA and the loan system, and now we plan to expand it.
The issue I brought to the attention of the Minister is when we provide loan bursary programs and we only charge, if memory serves me correctly, at 1 percent above the regular rate, it is very, very low. Here, we’re asking...
That’s okay. I’m two for two. Two questions, no answers. I’ll keep going.
Is it sanctioned and condoned and supported by this particular Minister that when a government official tells these people in a roomful of parents and daycare operators, et cetera, that if you could budget and manage your money better this wouldn’t be a problem? These are parents telling me this. Does the Minister stand by those words?
Mr. Speaker, I’m going to have questions for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment regarding some of this Junior Kindergarten stuff, just to follow up with some of the problems that we’ve talked about to date and certainly issues I’ve raised before.
I was speaking to two parents yesterday with grave concerns about this, because they had gone to an invitation at, I believe, our museum to talk about the impacts on day home operators, and the senior official said that, yes, you might lose a third of your income, but if you were better budgeters you would notice very little change.
Is...
Mr. Speaker, I would like to know what the Department of Transportation is going to do when it comes to finding out if we have any holdbacks on this particular work at this time and what are we going to do when we need to address these in the future. Quite frankly, a northern company that has investments here, that has employees hired here that wanted to do this particular work lost the job because the southern business lowballed them and it seems like we are going back to fix the work that they lowballed a northern company.
Are we at a financial risk or a legal risk in this situation because...
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I just want to pick up a little bit on one of the subjects Member Dolynny raised with the Deh Cho Bridge. Of course, I’ll be directing them, obviously, to the Minister of Transportation.
More than a year ago, I was raising with the former Minister of Transportation a concern about the electrical contractor, how he was quite proud about the fact that the southern contractor met the expectations of the contract, and of course, we had to award it to the southern contractor because they were cheaper. Of course, they met the standards of everything that they had asked for in...
Thank you. So, go to the website; interesting answer. As I brought up before, the website says send all correspondence through the president’s office. So the president gets to handle, control who knows what with the information. So the direct contact and accountability, what is the Minister afraid of to tell them to provide them with an Aurora College e-mail address because if they’re on the Board of Governors, they’re there as an advisory board, they’re there as an administrative board, or are they there for whatever reason? I don’t know. Maybe the Minister will take that initiative on and...
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. On February 5, 2014, I’d asked the Minister of Education to use some of his authority under Section 7 of the Aurora College Act. I asked him to tell the Aurora College Board of Governors to meet the students and certainly provide some e-mail addresses so people can contact them, but rather, they still appear to be anonymous. Perhaps they like it that way in a sense of governance of the board and the college for the students.
I want to hear what updates the Minister can provide the House immediately to find out has he actually done anything. Thank you.
See, Mr. Speaker, you’re so correct, because this is such a frustrating issue. I happen to look at all of them, and they all look the same because they all give the same answers: nothing.
The Education Minister is the one I’m, frankly, pointing at right now. Thank you for pointing that out. Frankly, has the Education Minister ever had the courage to come to the committee or the Assembly to ask for money to properly fund this program from the start, because I don’t know how he’s going to do more with less money.