Robert Hawkins

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement today I raised a matter that I take very seriously and I find very important. The matter really is about student safety while they’re travelling.

I want to ask the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment: would he look into the matter of making sure there are safety guidelines for all travelling students, and would he work with his partners at the school boards to make sure something could come forward as soon as possible?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ve heard I think three times that the schools take care of maintenance, and I appreciate that. That’s not the only issue. It’s an important issue — don’t get me wrong; it really is — but there are more issues. There are issues such as if the coach is the driver. The coach has been coaching all day, all weekend. Then what they do is they drive the team back in the dark, maybe on a cold winter’s day, and they’re exhausted.

Mr. Speaker, with those types of guidelines I’d like us to sort of take a formal approach, bring them together. It’s the guidelines of making sure...

Mr. Speaker, when they travel by school bus, I certainly hope that they are well maintained, et cetera. What this really comes down to is small teams. All big schools can afford big school buses, but when you send a small team…. As I recall very intimately, when I travelled in a small group, we used to take small vans and cars, and they sometimes went without any formal guidelines for safety.

Really, what I’m asking is: would the Minister look into things like guidelines that reflect making sure we have a first-aid kit, making sure the driver, who may be the coach, has a certain amount of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I am raising the topic of safety for students in the NWT. We all know that intercommunity sports and recreation events are an important part of a student’s life experience.

Mr. Speaker, I have many fond memories of travelling with Mr. Rick Tremblay when I was kid to communities for basketball, wrestling and cross-country events. As we all know too well, coaches, team mangers, chaperones and parents often take their teams to other communities in the NWT and Alberta. They make use of their own cars and minivans and sometimes rent vehicles and buses.

Sadly, I need to...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I won’t use a lot of time, but what I want to do is cite timing and process. First on the timing. I really like the timing. One of the complaints I generally hear and can obviously see is that timing is a problem. It’s been cited before, but I think it’s important to put it on the record from my perspective. When we approve the capital budgets at the end of March, it doesn’t get ignited into the realm of reality until April, May, June. Tenders come in; projects don’t start until the fall — those types of problems.

Now, that’s obviously not every project. We know that...

Mr. Speaker, social issues of this type and nature are the responsibility of the Government of the Northwest Territories, the responsibility of the Department of Health and Social Services. I’m not sure where she finds this in the mandate of the City of Yellowknife. I think what we are finding here is a situation where the City of Yellowknife is desperate because the Department of Health and Social Services has been ignoring these issues for so long. They have no other choice but to take on other issues that are outside their mandate.

So I ask again: would the Minister show some initiative by...

Mr. Speaker, the issue I raised today in my Member’s statement has a serious impact on the people who live and work in downtown Yellowknife. It causes many people great concern. The fact of the lack of public washrooms causes people to do natural things in unnatural places, if I may say. You know, that is not supporting dignity and humanity in the nicest of ways.

I know it’s far too easy to make jokes about this, and it is probably not uncommon to want to make jokes about something like this, but this is a serious issue. The people in the downtown riding want to move out of downtown. People don...

I just want to again say that too much information in the competitive process, by us giving it away, is like telling everybody what to bid. I just want to say it’s an issue near and dear to my heart, to show that we’re working as hard as we can to get the best prices for products. I cannot emphasize enough to the folks from Finance, obviously, from Public Works and everybody else who put this package together that it’s a good product, and I think it will serve us all very well going forward. I’m extremely thankful that the Minister, as well as many other government staff, heard the calls of...

Mr. Speaker, the Minister might be correct if I lived in Toronto, because the City of Toronto is mandated with health issues; maybe in Calgary, maybe in Edmonton if we lived in that little imaginary answer, but not in the city of Yellowknife. The City of Yellowknife is not mandated to take care of health and social services issues.

If the minister is willing to look into this and if she is willing to talk to the mayor — I can’t make a commitment on behalf of the mayor — is she willing to also look for appropriate funding if she finds that the city wants to take this issue on? Because this is a...

Mr. Speaker, that answer wasn’t quite what I was looking for, because I don’t believe it is a Municipal Affairs issue. Municipal issues are worries about property taxes, dogs and dumps. It wasn’t really designed to worry about the social issues around homelessness. The problem out of this situation is they’ve been picking up where the government has been failing miserably.

So I ask once again in maybe a slightly different way: would the Minister take leadership on this issue, show some initiative, get out there and say, “Look, maybe let’s see what we can do and contact some of our service...