Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When I got elected into the House here and during my campaign I told everybody that I would bring each and every issue to this table, whether it was personal, whether it was government, to get the right and appropriate answers that needed to be addressed.
For the last two months I’ve been dealing with a certain individual in Inuvik who has been having problems with this government, who was actually employed by this government at one time as a contractor. Last week we heard a lot of questions and concerns in regard to contracting and this one takes the cake.
We had a local contractor in Inuvik who just recently lost a contract to a southern company through the BIP process, the Business Incentive Policy. He is now unemployed. All his staff are unemployed.
Now he’s looking to find answers. He’s not looking for retribution. He wants answers. He wants answers on how he as a local contractor can lose the contract to a southern company when in fact this government had called him during the process and told him that he had won the contract, only to find out a few days later that he had in fact lost it. It was confusing to him. He didn’t know what was going on. He found out that he lost it during the BIP process and the awarding of that.
This government needs to be more transparent, something that it preaches a lot, and it needs to be fairer, something that it preaches on a daily basis. I’m not seeing this happen.
Over the last two months I’ve been really working to try to find answers for this contractor in Inuvik who is also a very good volunteer not only for Inuvik but for the Northwest Territories. While I was asking questions, I got moved from one department to another department, only to go to a third department who told me to go back to the first department, second. It was a very long process and was very confusing for myself, which made it more confusing for this individual.
Myself and this individual are going to work really hard to make sure that we do find the answers to this situation and how a local contractor, a person who’s going to get an award from this government for the good work that he does throughout the Northwest Territories. This is not over. We’ll take this as far as we need to take it to find the answers that we need so that other small contractors throughout the North don’t go through the same process.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. The honourable Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
