Bob McLeod

Thank you. I could answer that and give my own opinion, but this is a government and we deal with the government policies. So right now, P1s, or affirmative actions, are the top priority. P2s, people that have lived more than half their lives in the Northwest Territories, are second priorities, and then we have P3s. I think that what we’re reviewing is what would it take to give persons with disabilities a higher priority in our Affirmative Action Policy, and that’s what we would be looking at. We are looking at ways and then, at that point, we would bring it back to see if we could change our...

I get the impression that the Member has some issues with self-identification. The Member is correct; .4 percent is the number that has been on our records for the statistics for employing people with disabilities. We have undertaken surveys with regard to our Human Resource Strategy, and of the 1,200-plus people that have identified, at least 1 percent have identified themselves as being disabled. So that would be approximately a 60 percent increase in the number of disabled people within our workforce.

Having said that, we are taking a very logical approach to increasing our statistics. We...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, would like to recognize Mr. Ed Jeske, a long time educator, hockey supporter from minor hockey to old-timer, and also he now has an arena named after himself. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following document entitled Communities and Diamonds 2008 Annual Report of the Government of the Northwest Territories under the BHP Billiton, Diavik and De Beers Socio-economic Agreements. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

As I said, we have a significant number of programs. One of the most successful ones we had was the Western Harvesters Assistance Program where we partnered with all the aboriginal governments so that trappers could make some capital investments such as buying equipment and so forth. I think there is only one or two communities left that still haven’t accessed that program.

With regard to seniors, certainly we talk quite a bit about our SEED program, our Strategic Environmental Economic Development program. We have programs in there under small business and micro business where people are...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Department of ITI has a long history of programs to support harvesters and trappers so that they can have a choice when it comes to maintaining a way of life. Certainly we have a number of programs, totaling in the neighbourhood of $2 million, that would help support the traditional economy and, certainly, as anybody involved in sports knows, the future depends on getting youth involved and we’ve invested a lot, along with our many, many partners such as Education, Culture and Employment, MACA, industry and so on, into our Take a Kid Trapping program to introduce a...

I’ll just clarify that I think our objectives are the same when it comes to increasing the employability of people with disabilities and, again, you know, somebody said there’s statistics, damn lies, but I’m probably misquoting it.

The statistics, if you look at the workforce for the Northwest Territories, it should be around 8 percent, and I think that’s something we can probably reach agreement around what percentage we should be working towards. But nevertheless, I think what we’re setting in place with the Employability Working Group with looking at best practices with sensitivity training...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I indicated yesterday, it’s not something that we change overnight. It’s a process that takes some time and it’s a matter of working with partners and it’s a matter of changing the culture of an organization. Anecdotally, I know of at least two additional people with disabilities that have been hired, at least one of them has self-identified as disabled. So it’s our expectation that it’s an ongoing process and it will take some time to have some achievable results.

We are having the committee work with each of the regions and we are expecting that they will come forward with some recommendations in approximately six months or so.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The reason there is no IBA agreements is the project hasn’t advanced to that stage yet. It’s still under development and both Mactung and Selwyn are being very careful to make sure that they stay on the Yukon side. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.