Bob Bromley

Thanks for that information. It sounds like we’re never allowed to get ahead. We’re allowed to count for what the actual costs are this year through this unfortunate process, but wouldn’t it be great if we could do it at the beginning of the year so that we actually knew what our costs were roughly? We might even feed back a few thousand bucks at the end of the year, who knows? But I would be happy with a conservative estimate of increases based on our experience. It would just greatly reduce these sorts of costs, or at least adjustments. Thank you.

To the Minister, we’ve heard all about this amazing and costly maze of support, ineffective supports, that we have out there. We’re trying to move on here.

There are additional supports available to people in poverty, such as the GST rebate and the child tax credit. Despite their intent to help, our system takes that money away from families. I very much doubt that the money we save from chasing after these meagre funds even covers the cost of the government workers chasing after them.

How can the Minister justify clawing back payments that are meant to alleviate poverty when people are already...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I know these costs are always going up. Is this amount generally going up from year to year, the $22.9 million, for example? Are we always requesting these extra dollars for the increased costs? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are in follow up to my statement earlier today on poverty traps and directed to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment. Yesterday and today I think I made it clear that our social safety net has some pretty serious poverty traps in it, but I would like to give the Minister a chance to demonstrate differently. We track people on income support more than anyone else in the NWT. We know month by month what is in their bank account.

Will the Minister tell us how many people our system has helped rise out of poverty in the last year or any year?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I believe this is dealing with increased costs for health care services, non-NWT residents and NWT residents, and I believe we are collecting or recovering costs for the non-NWT residents. Is the amount that we are increasing for health care services provided to residents outside the NWT? Is this above normal and what is the full expenditures for that item, the increased costs for health care services outside the NWT? Rather than the increase, what is the full cost to give some context to that $3.775 million? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I would like to continue looking at our income security system and how it has created a series of poverty traps. You may remember I was telling a story about Charles and his three children. Charles is not a real person, but his story will be familiar to many people.

Let’s imagine that Charles lives in Fort Good Hope, because the Nutrition North Program keeps track of food costs there, allowing us to see how much it costs Charles to feed his family.

Nutrition North, what used to be called Food Mail, reported on their website last March that in Fort Good Hope it costs...

Thanks to the Minister. This sounds like a significant increase here and I’m surprised that the process is such that the Minister is not able to be prepared to answer very simple questions here. I would ask that this House consider a process to make sure the Minister has that information when bringing forward requests for increases such as this. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. What is the total budget here that this $170,000 is being added to and what will the total be at the end of the year?

Perhaps I could ask what the purpose of the Reserve Fund is and why it’s set at the point that it’s set at and why we are exceeding that by $26 million.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the point here. The point is we don’t want to hold up the program, but we do want to make sure that a community JK, junior kindergarten, group begins that there is a fully qualified early education worker on staff there. I appreciate that amendment and this motion, this amendment to the amendment, supports Mr. Menicoche’s suggestion to delete the phrase “group before the program is implemented” and replace that so that it says there is at least one fully trained early education worker for every junior kindergarten group before that group begins in that...