Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement today I talked about NGO funding, multi-year funding. We have a fine group of volunteers in Hay River who went to some amount of work out of a genuine concern for offering services and programs to persons with disabilities in Hay River. We should have multi-year funding. They ended up with funding for one year. The funding was late in coming. There was no discretionary latitude applied to the money that they had received to allow them to re-profile some of those funds for the months that had been lost while they waited for approval.
I realize that we need to have accountability for contribution agreements that we make to NGOs. There needs to be accountability, but we need to find a balance between burdening those NGOs down with endless compiling of statistics, and reporting, and report writing, and application proposal writing, with actually doing the work that they want to do and that is on the front-line helping those people. I can tell you that the program in Hay River has been extremely successful.
I would like to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services and Minister responsible for Persons with Disabilities, what can we do in the future to avoid this?
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, Ms. Lee.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Listening to her questions as well as the Member’s statement, I want to say first off that we do provide multi-year funding to organizations. We review them on a case-by-case basis. So I want to state that to start with.
There are two issues the Member is raising. One is there are some specific situations here that happened with respect to this organization whereby they asked to make adjustments specifically, and I would like to look into that and I can commit to look into those details and see how we could accommodate. Secondly, I will undertake also to see if we could look into doing multi-year funding with this organization.
It seems like it would be a lot of work to judge each application, each proposal, each funding agreement individually. Are there not guidelines, parameters that, for example, four months into a fiscal year an NGO has their funding approved? In the meantime they have not been able to procure the services of an office manager or Internet services or different things that they would have on a monthly basis. Then they receive their funding four months into that fiscal year for the full year, but they’re only allowed to spend per month what was in the proposal. Is there not a standard? Would it really require the Minister to judge those individually or could there not be a standard policy whereby if the NGO was seen worthy of that contribution, that they would also been found to be worthy to make a judgment call about, for example, increasing the hours for the remainder of that fiscal year for their office personnel, for example?
Ideally when a group gets funded they should be given enough notice to make adjustments between fiscal years and to be able to plan. I’m not sure if you need a multi-year arrangement to do that, because an argument could still be made that even if you had a multi-year, if there’s some kind of an operational and procedural delay, that’s the issue there in what the Member is saying. Without knowing details of the situation, I don’t know what happened to have the delay and also why some of those very specific adjustments that were requested were denied. I think we should leave room for some of the financial accounting rules or some other rules that we’re not aware of in this Chamber that our officials are asked to follow. This is why I’d rather undertake to look into this and get back to the Member with a more detailed answer. I am willing to be open-minded to look at some options.
In the case of this particular NGO I would certainly be happy to provide the detail to the Minister on the delay in approval, the delay in commencing the services that would normally be carried out by this office, and the amount of money that was related to that delay and get the Minister’s approval, I guess, if that’s the level that we have to take it to, to get the Minister’s approval to have that money re-profiled and reallocated for the remainder of that year. I’m happy to provide that to the Minister. I’m just hopeful that an NGO would not have to in all instances make such an application, that there would be something within the framework, within the policy of the funding and contribution agreements that would, when we know it’s a delayed approval, it’s a delayed receipt of funds in that year and so many months have gone by, that there would be a way of making a more blanket policy that that funding could be spent by that NGO in that remainder of the fiscal year.
I think I can safely state that just for our department there are lots of NGOs that we fund that are delivering many, many really substantive programming, like YWCA, Sally Ann, all of our...I don’t know. I don’t want to exclude anybody. They have the stability of funding. All those applications do not come up to my office where I need to review them. So I think we need to accept that there are different types and sizes and characters of NGOs and I want to assure the Member that I don’t micromanage in that way. This is why I just want to undertake to look at this situation and see what happened from an accounting and procedural point of view. I will look to see if this group is one that could be considered for multi-year funding, if that’s what could have prevented what’s happening here. It’s because there are so many kinds of NGOs it’s hard for me to say that we could just do a blanket approach in this way.
Thank you, Ms. Lee. The honourable Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
