Bob McLeod

We are committed to increase the number of business travellers to the North, so we’ll certainly be prepared to look at this area of financial incentives, and we’ll look at what the Yukon is doing, and we’ll also look at how the money that we’re spending through the SEED funding, how that’s working with regard to increasing the number of business travellers. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I thank the Member for raising this issue, because it’s very important for us to continue to find ways to attract visitors to the Northwest Territories. As the Member indicated, there has been a significant decline in the business traveller sector of visitors to the Northwest Territories. With the reduced airfares, especially to Yellowknife, we have a significant increase in the number of visitors to the Northwest Territories; but in the business traveller category, the numbers have decreased by 22 percent, which is a significant number. The dollars that represents is...

Our government operates on the basis of merit, so employees that progress through different promotions and different employment opportunities either compete for the jobs and get them on their own merit or if they are direct appointed or on a transfer assignment. It’s based on merit. Senior level positions like deputies and associate deputy ministers, my experience is that the senior management skills are transferrable; that if you’re working with one department, generally you should be able to manage different levels of departments, and we recognize that in our deputy minister cohort where we...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As a government, our greatest resource, our greatest asset is our human resources and it’s very important for us to make sure that we have a qualified public service in order to do all the work that we need them to do.

The Member is correct that our public service is aging. The average age is 44 years old. That’s the average age of our public service. Sixty-three percent of our employees are over 40 years old. Obviously we need to pay a lot of attention to succession planning. Specifically in the senior management category, over the next five years 40 percent of our...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Our tourism facilities and our parks are wonderful assets of this government and it’s usually some of the first impressions that visitors to the Northwest Territories see. Unfortunately, two years ago the tourism budget was cut and so the improvements that we were going to do to our facilities had to be rescheduled and we had to make do with the limited budgets that we had. The budget that was cut was never replenished, so we have to operate within a limited amount of resources. For our tourism season, we operate within the limited resources that we have to operate...

Mr. Speaker, as a major participant in the Northwest Territories economy, the Government of the Northwest Territories has had a longstanding policy commitment to encourage and support the development of a healthy private sector. That commitment is reflected in the Business Incentive Policy, which is the Government of the Northwest Territories preferential procurement policy.

I am pleased to report that the Government of the Northwest Territories has revised the Business Incentive Policy after two years of consultations with Members of the Legislative Assembly, the Northwest Territories business...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Premier and all of the Ministers on this side, we’ve said that the North has never received as much attention as we’re getting now and certainly we’ve always said that the best way to promote Arctic sovereignty is to have healthy sustainable communities, and that includes building highways and so on, and developing all the business opportunities such as oil and gas. So we are going to be working very hard as a government to ensure that we do create jobs for remote communities. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, we have done a lot of work in this area already but we are prepared to do even more. We committed at the Beaufort-Delta Regional Council that we would host a regional workshop with the members of the community in which we would look at opportunities. We would even look at setting out a plan as what we would need to go forward. We would even go as far as look at creating an inventory of possible jobs or opportunities that could be moved to some of the communities. I don’t know if we have call centres that could be moved or not, but we’re prepared to look at those types of...

Mr. Speaker, I would be pleased to do that, because one of the things in tourism and parks that we like to do is we like to see people using and enjoying our facilities. We will be pleased to come up with a number and maybe even amend our business plan, if that was at all possible. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

We have had a lot of discussion with our clientele, what visitors and campers and people who come to enjoy nature, what their expectations are when they come to utilize a tourism park or facility, and they want to make sure that we have clean facilities, that they have an ability to enjoy nature and the environment, and we cannot do that if we just leave the parks wide open and have no control and no monitoring. We’ve come to learn that we have to have some control in order to make sure that we maintain our facilities and that the people who use the parks can enjoy the facilities. Thank you.