Bob McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s our intention to review the Summer Student Program the way we do every year. We’ve discontinued the hiring of students as of August 15th. We’ll review our practices. We will review the exit interviews that were done with summer students and we’ll assess how successful we have been. We think we’ve been successful this year, considering our fiscal situation. We’ve increased the hiring of the number of summer students from last year. We’re not aware of any significant staffing issues when it came to the hiring of summer students and we will incorporate that into next...

I would say that without the involvement of the different filmmakers we would never have gotten this far. They have been working with us every step of the way. Now that we’ve identified funding, they’ve been working with us to develop the criteria. Certainly I would want to continue to work with them and I would certainly like to see such an organization be developed, so we’ll work on that area.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are talking about an NWT film industry, so it’s our intention to go across the Territories and we’ll probably do it on a regional basis and update our website as we go along.

Thank you. I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Deh Cho, that Bill 17, An Act to Amend the Territorial Parks Act, be read for the third time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I know that there are some transition requirements due to our energy priorities plan, so we would take that into consideration there. I don’t know if we can incorporate it into the Greenhouse Gas Strategy because I think that’s pretty well close to completion and release. We’ll certainly endeavour to put it through the transition plan.

With the recent developments in new technologies in renewable and alternative forms of energy, I think it would be appropriate for us to do so. Our only consideration is we’ve been working mainly at the behest of the communities and we would want to go back to the communities and indicate that we want to take another look at... I guess to me I think the best course would be to find a way to use all forms of energy. I know we talked to different provinces and they’re using alternative and renewable energy to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. There are certainly new capacities in storage of...

Thank you. I guess the reason summer students are hired in January and February is we ask summer students to put in their applications by the end of December of every year. So for 2012 we ask the summer students to put in, those interested in getting summer employment, to put in their applications by December of 2011. So we’re quite prepared to look at the process. If it means that we should wait until April for summer students to put in their applications and have everybody compete for every job and if we think that works out in the best interests, we’ll be prepared to look at that and see...

As I’ve said many times, our staffing in the Government of the Northwest Territories is based on merit. If the Member has any incidences where he’s seen hiring done because of who you know, well, we certainly want to be made aware of it so that we can investigate.

In every instance we try to follow the merit principle. As far as hiring of summer students, if he wants to hire only the most experienced summer students, only summer students that are in the fourth year of their programs... We try to make sure that we have a mix of summer students and we try to make sure that we hire as many summer...

In the past when we looked at developing the NWT film industry, we had concerns that we wanted to make sure that the Northwest Territories benefitted. Through the work of the consultant, we were able to identify that NWT filmmakers were causing the Northwest Territories to benefit to the order of magnitude of $9 million, and that was without the government investing any money.

We do have the approach to collecting this information. We’ll continue to do it. We will collect it on a regular basis. It’s our intention to continue to invest, and invest more money as we go along and as our government...

We do work very closely with the Department of Education. As a matter of fact, our offices are right next door to each other so we interact on a regular basis. We work together very closely on a number of these strategies. We developed the NWT Arts Strategy and we all participated at NWT House. We’ve been working on a cured show, and it is our intention to work very closely on promoting and developing the NWT film industry. We will be meeting as we go forward and work together to promote this.