Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m going to follow up on my Member’s statement. In our main estimates it shows that there has been an increase to the forced growth for two not-for-profit organizations. I’d like to commend the Premier for taking that initiative to get our organizations, that do excellent work on behalf of government, and getting their wages and benefits up to par with what we pay our government employees. So my first question is to the Premier.
When we’re going through an exercise like this, who initiates that process? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. The honourable Premier, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In this case it was the NGOs in question. Thank you.
So, moving forward just in terms of awareness and an education component, hopefully some of our non-profit organizations that we do fund are listening and can take that same process, but sometimes those organizations don’t want to come knocking at the door.
Would the Premier make a recommendation to his Cabinet Ministers to go and talk to their non-profit organizations and see if they do in fact need an increase in their funding for salaries and wages and benefits to keep up to par? Thank you.
The Government of the Northwest Territories has what we call a Third-Party Accountability Framework and that is to deal with third parties who provide services and programs to the Government of the Northwest Territories. In the interest of accountability and transparency, we have a framework in which we determine the level of accountability for third-party agencies, which includes political risk, financial risk and results risk, and on the basis of that rating we put them into three categories, which determines the funding process that we use. Thank you.
Can I ask the Premier, when was the framework developed and what year did it come into effect and, in fact, if that framework will be reviewed? Thank you.
Thank you. The framework was developed in 2004 and in 2011 it was updated with a Program Managers Guide for Funding NGOs. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Moses.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Just making a recommendation to the Premier, would the Premier, in the framework, make it mandatory that forced growth with all our non-profit organizations be reviewed or even the framework be reviewed every four years or every time there’s a GNWT negotiating the Collective Agreement for our GNWT employees and do the same for our not-for-profit sector? The ones that we fund.
Thank you. The Third-Party Accountability Framework results in three categories of third-party funding. The first category is for major service delivery bodies and that provides for multi-year funding through the business planning process.
The second category is for other service delivery and commercial Crown corporations that don’t have large infrastructure, and in those cases there’s a mandatory budget consultation with the funding departments.
The third category is for the much smaller, quasi-judicial, smaller NGOs and those are annual funding requests or application-based. Through that process they would approach their department for funding.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.
