Bob McLeod

Mr. Speaker, management of the public service is a shared responsibility with all departments. We do have a deputy ministers’ human resource committee, and we’ll make sure that all of the departments are aware of this.

Mr. Speaker, it doesn’t sound like it’s a summer student issue; it sounds like it’s a government operations issue. Certainly one of the initiatives of our government is to work on making our operations a lot more effective and efficient, including the reduction and elimination of wasteful practices.

Through the BDIC board we do work with different companies and through the business programs of this government. We make every effort to work with them to get them through this difficult period.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The tourism industry is facing a number of challenges these days for a number of reasons: partly the volatility of the financial market, the currency exchange rate, and there seems to be a trend to move away from the consumptive sports — hunting and fishing — toward more adventure, ecotourism opportunities. As a department we recognized this several years ago, and we put forward a number of different diversification and marketing programs to help existing operators develop new tourism products.

Mr. Speaker, the Member referred to the human resource strategic plan that we’re developing, which will be a ten year strategic plan, with our ultimate goal to reaffirm that the GNWT public service is the best place to work in the Northwest Territories. It’s unclear to me what kind of retribution these summer students would be fearful of. We do provide them with an opportunity to respond through exit interviews. As we go through our consultation, if the general feeling is that we should provide a blog, an opportunity for them to respond, we are quite prepared to do so.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As a government we are very pleased that we were able to offer summer student employment to 281 summer students. I’m quite surprised to hear it appears the majority were disillusioned, because of the fact that we’ve taken extra steps to ensure that summer students were gainfully employed. We provided orientation opportunities for them, and we worked very closely with all of the departments to make sure that their employment was meaningful and allowed them to gain some skills that they could carry forward.

As well, we do provide the opportunity for exit interviews for...

We are undertaking our review shortly. We’ll be coming out with a discussion paper. I think it would be of great assistance for the community leaders and people to tell us what their concerns are and how they would like to see us operate. We’ll be coming forward with those short term/long term solutions through the business planning process. In the longer term, with the results of the review and feedback and direction from the Members here, we would look at making whatever changes would be required, including restructuring, new rates, what have you.

Mr. Speaker, certainly we want to work with the small communities. Recognizing the high cost of energy in communities and as we roll out our business plans, we expect to have working with the communities be a large part of it.

As we said, we are undertaking a review where we’re going to leave no stone unturned. We’re looking at every option, including if the Legislative Assembly wants to take on the responsibility for setting the power rates. If that’s what we want to do, we will look at that option. Somehow I don’t think we want to do that, but we will undertake a review, and we will come forward with the results.

Mr. Speaker, we’re looking at a wide range of possibilities with regard to rates. We want to hear from the people out there, the electricity users, whether that is something that would be supported. A levelized rate would mean that everybody pays the same rates throughout the Northwest Territories, whether you use hydroelectricity or thermal electricity or diesel electricity. At the time the decision was made to go with the postage rates, it was felt that rates should be accumulated by individual communities. With our review we will go to the communities, and we will find out what the users...