Robert Hawkins

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.

Mr. Chairman, I asked this question well over three months ago and I’m still waiting for an answer. I’ve asked it in committee. The Minister said that they would get back to me. If it’s my error that I’ve received your response, which I’m pretty sure I haven’t, please resend.

The fact is my understanding is that no one has responded to me after three months on this issue. I, frankly, want us to find ways to ensure that we attract well-educated people back to the Northwest Territories. I think it’s of great value that we have people from the Northwest Territories who have spent most of their...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m going to use today’s opportunity to return to one of my favorite subjects, which happens to be the consumer affairs protection division, or lack thereof, Mr. Speaker.

Many Northerners continue to wait for any action from this division and certainly by the Minister and for years have been continuing to raise issues about the restrictiveness and confusing concerns around cell phone contracts, problems around homeownership purchasing, protection, the fact that homes don’t require full disclosure under protection rules, and payday loans continue to hold people at risk...

He just said Ms. Saturnino.

Mr. Speaker the government official continues on by saying if you can’t manage your own money, give us your budgets and we’ll do it for you, and by the way, you probably won’t notice any change. What facts support that when the government takes a third of the revenue stream and moves them over to Junior Kindergarten, and the government seems to be telling everybody, don’t worry, go to the schools for free child care, but don’t worry, lots of people still want to pay $1,000 a month, so you’ve got no problems. What does the government think about that and does the Minister stand by that, that...

That’s not an answer. When the senior official says day homes need to accept that things are going to change and you’re going to lose money and you need to accept that, when two parents are telling me this yesterday, directed from our government, which in essence is the Minister’s words if you put it this way, because they’re head of the department, is this sanctioned, condoned and stood by, by this Minister?