Bob McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We received the letter yesterday from the mayor of the City of Yellowknife, and also the Member has been a city councillor for nine years, so he doesn't seem to appreciate the good working relationship that this government and the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs has with the NWT Association of Communities. However, having said that, we will take the letter; we will break it out into different pieces; even though we are working on many, many legislative priorities, we will work with the city to make sure that these proposals are dealt with in a timely...

I don't like to speculate so I'll respond to his question when I have the exact date.

As we indicated, that is our intention and that is part of the business planning process of the Government of the Northwest Territories.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are always open to any methods that will move legislation faster. If the Member has some ideas, we would certainly be prepared to entertain them. We would also like to work with all of the Members to help us identify what should be the priorities.

Some of the legislative priorities we're working on, the Department of MACA is working on, is to update the civil emergency procedures, the territorial emergency procedures, the fire prevention and community fire prevention plans, the Western Canada Lotteries legislation, legislation for 911, access to information for...

We have been doing some research on a number of these initiatives. I was around when the hotel tax was proposed and was introduced, and so we have the research completed on the hotel levy. We are very close to finalizing research on energy retrofits, and we will be moving forward with consultations with other communities. As a matter of fact, MACA officials met with the city on September 29th and they agreed on a work plan. We expect that, in early 2017, we will able to move forward. We also need to work with other departments, Ministers, MACA, Justice and Finance, because some of the...

Decentralization continues to be a priority of this government. Over the past few years as a government we have not made excuses for not decentralizing. In the past, there have been issues with lack of housing, lack of office space, and as a government we've invested $21 million, I think it's $7 million a year for housing, to support decentralization. We invested about $300,000 for office space, and we asked our departments to identify opportunities for decentralization on an annual basis. For the most part, the suggestions or recommendations are small units or divisions that lend themselves...

As a government, we've done a number of initiatives over the years to increase the number of employment in small communities. I guess the one that's been more successful has been our Government Services Officer Program where we have taken vacant positions and converted them into government services officer positions and I think we have been able to hire approximately 20 government services officer positions in small communities and they're all filled and they're providing a very useful service. We also have the Skills 4 Success program which incorporates input from industry, NWT residents, and...

The majority of funding for summer students comes from vacant positions in the Government of the Northwest Territories. As my colleague indicated in his line of questioning a couple of days ago, generally, rule of thumb, you're looking at about 10 per cent vacancy rate. So to take positions, possibly taken away from families, people that have jobs and have their own children, and convert them to summer student positions would not be seen as the ideal way to go. Over the years we've been very successful in hiring summer students. As I said, the maximum has been 341 and I wouldn't want to set a...

Hiring a summer student is a priority for this government and has been for every government that I recall. As a premier I work very closely with my colleagues and all Ministers share the goal of supporting youth in their development, which includes supporting them with employment opportunities within the Government of the Northwest Territories. Usually, at this time of the year we are reviewing how well this past summer went. Usually in December, we start receiving applications from summer students and going forward we review the statistics on a weekly basis and I discuss with my colleagues...

Mr. Speaker, I wish to advise Members that the Honourable Caroline Cochrane will be absent from the House today, tomorrow and Wednesday to attend the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Ministers of Housing meeting in Ottawa, Ontario. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.