Bob McLeod

Mr. Speaker, I guess there’s a number of reasons for that. I certainly concur with the Member that we need to do a better job to improve our employment of persons with disabilities. I guess the large part of the problem — and she’s already alluded to it — is self-identification. I do know that we have employees who are not self-identified, but that doesn’t make the situation any better, as the Member says.

I think that what we need to do is to work very closely with the groups that work with persons with disabilities and work with individuals to improve the situation. I think the Affirmative...

We certainly can commit to do that. Also, I’d like to point out that we’re working very closely with the diamond companies. We think this is a problem for all of us to work together on to try to resolve this situation.

We met with diamond companies in early December. We will continue to work with them. We can also work with the communities to make them more attractive for workers who live in the south to relocate to the Northwest Territories.

As the Member knows, we have a socio-economic agreement that we negotiated with De Beers. As part of the agreement, there’s an implementation provision that allows, for a certain period of time, for De Beers to provide these employees. Over the longer term, it is our expectation that De Beers and the diamond company as well will hire Northern workers to work in the mines in accordance with the socio-economic agreements that have been negotiated.

I should also point out that in each of the cases, the other diamond companies are also providing — I guess the Member called them migrant workers —...

Mr. Speaker, the new Tourism Product Diversification and Marketing Program was officially launched by the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment on January 7, 2008.

This program will provide N.W.T. operators with the knowledge and means to reinvent or expand their tourism products and operations, to capitalize on changing markets, and to better meet the trends and demands that we anticipate will provide growth for our tourism industry in the future.

As part of the investment outlined in the Tourism 2010 strategy, Industry, Tourism and Investment and Northwest Territories Tourism have...

I think the pent-up demand is still there. It just became a question of cash-flowing the money. We rolled out the program on January 7, and as the applications have been rolling in, we realized that, as part of the cash-flowing, we weren’t going to have enough applications to flow the whole $2.5 million in this fiscal year. To ensure that all the money goes for tourism operators, we put forward a request to re-profile it. And that’s why we’re bringing it forward here as part of the supplementary appropriation.

The overall effect is that we’re still going to have $5.6 million over four years...

That certainly was the intention of the payroll tax. It comes down to a question of monitoring and enforcement. Wherever we are aware of it, the Department of Finance follows up to make sure that the payroll tax is imposed. It’s more difficult to impose when the payments to individual workers are made outside of the Northwest Territories. That would be an area where we would have to look to see how we can improve the monitoring and follow-up and collection of payroll taxes.

For those areas of responsibility such as construction contracts that are awarded by our government, we will certainly follow up to make sure that the requirements of the various contracts are adhered to.

With regard to workers from Newfoundland who are brought in to do construction projects rather than hiring local citizens, we would have to bring this to the attention of the federal government, which has responsibility for labour standards.

I want to point out a couple of things. First of all, I am familiar with the letter that the Member is referring to. We've reviewed this request on at least two occasions and have expanded the original ruling to make Arctic Winter Games leave available to the chairs of the various committees and to the first-responders.

This is an area where we have had some responses from volunteers who are not G.N.W.T. employees, who don't think it’s a good use of money when somebody working as a volunteer beside them is getting paid and they're volunteering their own time. We have to have a bit of a balance...

I too am looking forward to the Arctic Winter Games. We’re looking forward to having the most successful games on record. I understand that the Arctic Winter Games Host Society have reached their quota for volunteers and have shut off their requests for assistance.

I think I should point out that we have followed the policies of the government, and any employees who require time off have not been denied. We haven’t denied any reasonable requests. I think that as a government…. And we also have a commitment from our senior managers that we want to make the Arctic Winter Games a success.

We have...

I guess the best recognition is the performance pay that employees receive. If they perform well, they receive performance pay. I think the Member is looking for “dollars for ideas” type of programs. We don’t have that, but we do have formal employee recognition programs that are provided on a regular basis.