Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my statement I talked about the exciting first day of session and under the new regime of devolution. My questions today will be for the Premier of the Northwest Territories. He has indicated that a public review of the devolution legislation will begin, and he has indicated a website, but I’m just wondering: can the Premier elaborate on how this public consultation will happen on the review of devolution legislation?
Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. The honourable Premier, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We started even before devolution came into effect, by a public information campaign so that the people in the public could understand what devolution was all about. We’ve activated the website. We put information in all the newspapers with regard to devolution. We have an interactive website now where we will be asking the public to correspond with, and we will be collecting all of that information with the objective of having it in place in the fall. Then we expect it will take about a month to gather all of the feedback that we get through the website, and then we would report back to the committees and to the Assembly. We also will be working with the committees on this review.
I guess my next question is about the timing. The Premier indicated that he was going to be working with committee, but we are going into a summer session and we won’t be here for the summertime until we come back in the fall. I’m just wondering about the timing and would the department or the government look at extending that time so that it comes into the fall when most of the Assembly comes back as well as most of the people in the Northwest Territories go on the land and go have their kids away from school. So the focus is definitely not on politics.
Would the government look at extending that to a six-month period maybe until Christmastime, so they would get full consultation with the public?
Like the Member, we want to make sure we have a very thorough, transparent review of the devolution legislation, so we’d be quite prepared to extend the review to whatever period of time would be seen to be appropriate; December or even later to the next year, keeping in mind that the longer we extend, the more we get into transitional arrangements. But I think to be very thorough and transparent, we would be prepared to do that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
The Premier indicated that they are doing a survey of the website. I wonder if there is going to be any consultation, like any public meetings. I know the assemblies are coming forward in the summertime.
Are we planning to have some meetings in the different communities throughout the Northwest Territories to get public feedback that way?
We will want to look at that. We attend all of the annual assemblies. To make sure we have a thorough and transparent process, we will take that into consideration. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Bouchard.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The next question I had was about devolution and the new positions. We’ve taken on some federal positions, but we’ve also created. I’m just wondering what the update is on those positions.
Have we hired all those people? Are we 50 percent complete? For the new positions we created for devolution, have we hired everybody? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
We’ve created 206 new territorial government jobs to provide for devolution, and as of May 6th there were 60 vacant positions. Now that we’re near the end of May, I expect the majority of those jobs have been filled, but I will commit to reviewing the numbers again and provide the information to the Member. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.
