Bob McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following two documents entitled Government of the Northwest Territories Contracts Over $5,000 Report for the Fiscal Year Ending March 31, 2011, and 2010-2011 Grants and Contributions Results Report, August 2011.

I can think of a number of barriers. I think it’s very similar to when the government developed the Traditional Knowledge Policy. In a lot of cases at the community level, people, when there were no other medical services, used traditional healing or traditional knowledge with regard to traditional medicines and how they dealt with different kinds of illnesses or accidents. So there is the formal. It’s the same when you look at scientific knowledge and traditional knowledge. It’s a question of how do you recognize it. So we would have to work with our Department of Health because traditional...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have had some discussions on it, mainly because of the fact that we have had some requests from Aboriginal employees that have been to visit and seek traditional healing from different places in Canada.

This is something that is starting to be recognized in formal medical circles. We are trying to make sure that we can deal properly with employees that want to seek traditional healing. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The 16th Legislative Assembly worked to refocus government to achieve greater effectiveness and efficiency in how the Government of the Northwest Territories operates and delivers programs and services. In order to provide a high level of service to the people of the Northwest Territories, we must continue to develop and maintain a professional and well-managed public service.

Later today I will be tabling the 2010 Public Service Annual Report. The Public Service Annual Report highlights the overall results of public service performance achieved in the context of 20/20: A Brilliant North, the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following two documents entitled 2010 Public Service Annual Report, Government of the Northwest Territories, and 2011 Employee Satisfaction and Engagement Survey and Human Resources Client Satisfaction Survey.

As I indicated, we are looking at how to increase cultural awareness and diversity. I think that would be a start. We’ll get our consultant to help us in identifying those areas and make sure that those employees that practice it are not dismissed out of hand and we can try to work together to find ways to deal with it.

We don’t have a plan, per se. As the Member may know, within the Government of the Northwest Territories most of our expenses are either covered through our insurance policies or through the government programs. I guess the difficulty we’ve been having is to identify -- how would I say it -- in a formal medical sense we have to deal with certifications and we need approved medical criteria that we deal with. We don’t necessarily have that with traditional healing. Generally we deal with it on an ad hoc individual basis, but we are doing some work to promote cultural awareness and diversity...

Mr. Speaker, I’d like to recognize Morag MacPherson, the founder and creative force behind ArtsEnergy. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. At the time -- and we have to remember that this process started about 10 years ago -- it was envisioned that it would be a stand-alone community gasification process and it was proceeded on that basis. We’ve gone forward with those communities where it seemed to be feasible. During our interventions, during the Joint Review Panel hearings we made representation that provisions should be made to offload from the pipeline to convert these communities to natural gas if it was deemed fit to proceed. That’s the reason we proceeded on that basis.

Thank you. I think looking at the statistics, in this year we hired 286 students. Fifty-nine percent of the summer students hired were Aboriginal students or P1s, 40 percent were non-Aboriginals that lived more than half their life in the Northwest Territories, what we call P2s. So I’m not sure what the Member is suggesting the problem is. Is he suggesting that we should only hire high school graduates for one year so that we can hire the most students without any experience? I’m not sure what the objective of his line of questioning is. So maybe if he could clarify that, we can make some...