Robert Hawkins

The Minister says it takes a community, but it also takes leadership at the Minister’s office. What is the Minister doing to engage the students to find out what types of incentives they need to be partners in their own future? Not just the parents, not just the district education authorities and not just everybody in the ivory tower at the buildings downtown.

What are the students being talked to and engaged about? What it would take for them to want to graduate? Is the Minister doing that outreach and what is the outreach determining?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to ask a question. My question will be to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment just to help build a little further on our theme day for education, Mr. Speaker. First I should say, once again, thank you to the Bureau of Stats for their great assistance in helping me with this question because their details, I couldn’t live without.

In 2012-13 in grades 10 to 12 we had 2,582 students enrolled. However, current details tell us that only 437 students graduated. That’s approximately 50 percent if we just work the math through and...

Again, I appreciate the answer from the Minister, but we’ve got a bit of a trend here where some of our employees, be it at Stanton or at some of the downtown offices, and not only recently but there has been over a number of months in a couple of years that the staff have been in jeopardy or some type of peril because of these types of incidents. Rather than waiting for the occupational health and safety committee to make its recommendation or even to meet for goodness sakes, what proactive approach is the Minister of Human Resources doing and directing through policy to ensure our employees...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ll have questions for the Minister of Human Resources right now. We’ve all been made well aware of the experience and certainly the security issues that have happened around Stanton Hospital where many of our staff have come under some scares due to a security issue. My fear, of course, is that Stanton may be more of a symptom of problems as opposed to a particular one. Rather than focusing strictly in on Stanton, which would probably be a mistake at this particular time, I want to look broadly across our public service and ask the Minister of Human Resources what...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the UN, had said, “Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.” I couldn’t agree more. I really believe education is the true future before us. It’s one we can write and help others write their own future.

I once again call upon this government to take a hard look at what it’s doing to the future of education. We’ve all heard about the travesty of its plan on junior kindergarten, not thought out, well-conceived and believed in, but yet not thought out....

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Is the GNWT willing to put, sort of, money where their mouth is and start to make a commitment to the engineering and the environmental assessment on this particular project so we are able to get this off the ground so when the federal government does get off and make a decision and finally agree that this is an important highway to connect people and families and certainly put industry together and create a window of opportunity for people to go to work?

Is the GNWT placed in order to be able to respond in a timely way to these important things? Thank you.

I think I was reading in the Huffington Post a few weeks ago about how important connecting communities to road infrastructure is and how it changes the life when it comes to cost of living. It adds benefits such as regular fuel supply, regular grocery supply and certainly family connections. I could go on about the merits, but the question really is when can we expect to see it in the capital plan to help lower the costs of communities like that, that are so close to the highway? We could make a real difference and a dent in the cost of living in their lives. We should be on this.

If we estimate that this could take – one day is $40,000 – six weeks, that’s almost $1.7 million. This is certainly an expensive meter running at the cost of the NWT taxpayers.

Is the Minister able to update us at all other than what the media report has already covered out there? Otherwise, we’re just sitting in the dark not knowing what’s happening and it’s very difficult to deliver any type of accountability on this particular initiative. It’s not about criticism, it’s about transparency as to what’s happening and what will taxpayers be on the hook for. Thank you.

Thank you. What’s the anticipated cost of this particular problem that we have going on right now? Can the Minister qualify the additional cost it’s going to run? Although he’d pointed out how we’re going to pay for it, let’s find out exactly how much we think it’s going to cost. Thank you.

Thanks, Mr. Speaker. I too wish to acknowledge and recognize a couple constituents. First off, Ms. Julie Green, a well-known person here in Yellowknife for her many activities. Thank you very much for your hard work. I believe Grant Gowans is still a constituent of Yellowknife Centre, if he hasn’t moved and, of course, if he’s still up there. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.