Brendan Bell

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Deh Cho, that Bill 6, Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act, 2005, be read for the second time.

Madam Speaker, this bill corrects inconsistencies and errors in the statutes of the Northwest Territories and deals with other matters of a minor, non-controversial and uncomplicated nature. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Deh Cho, that Bill 3, An Act to Amend the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, be read for the second time.

Madam Speaker, this bill changes the definition of “employee” to include persons who perform services as appointees, volunteers and students and persons who perform services under contracts and agency relationships. Employees are prohibited from disclosing personal information without authorization. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Deh Cho, that Bill 6, Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act, 2005, be read for the first time. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Deh Cho, that Bill, 3 An Act to Amend the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, be read for the first time. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a very comprehensive and broad response required to that difficult question. It is a priority of the government to start to address the cost of living in the North, and it’s one that cuts across many departments and many aspects of life in the North. Obviously we need to make more land available for housing developments. We need to pursue opportunities like hydro to make sure that the cost of electricity across the North isn’t so onerous. There are many things that we need to do. We need to focus as a government on a number of these issues, but there is no...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Deh Cho, that Bill 5, An Act to Amend the Judicature Act, be read for the first time. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, in much of this discussion, we tend to want to focus on the hypothetical, the what-ifs. We don’t know what’s going to happen and obviously we can’t chain people up and force them to work or force them to live somewhere. We have to do our best to make sure that it is an environment that people want to live in; that’s what we are here to do. We are here to improve life, reduce the cost of living and make sure this is the best place in the country to live. I believe it is. Will some people want to move south because they have now seen a window? I don’t know. I guess hypothetically...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a difficult issue for us to address, but we know what we need to do is get more northerners trained, especially for the jobs that require a high level of expertise. The fact of the matter at that specific mine is 70 percent of their workforce -- I think it’s 72 percent, in fact -- are northerners. The other 30 percent currently come from the South. Had we had that expertise locally available in the North, there would be no one coming in from the South. That is our goal. That’s why we have programs set up like the ASEP program that the Minister of Education has...

We agree that we need to keep the pressure up on getting this bridge funding. The voting in Ottawa and the uncertainty obviously impacted our ability to get a meeting, but we had some work to do prior to that meeting. We and the aboriginal governments had to sit down to quantify the impacts and be able to put enough detail and substantiation behind our ask that the federal government could move that forward and talk to the Treasury Board about that. There was some work for us to do. We have had meetings now and I believe going on this week in Ottawa with our senior staff and federal...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. No. Our Premier and Finance Minister were very clear with the federal Ministers and with the Deputy Prime Minister that these were really on parallel courses. We wanted to sit down with our aboriginal partners and negotiate some bridge funding to deal with social impacts, but our key priority and the priority of northern governments was to get a resource revenue sharing deal and an AIP by this summer. We know that the Deputy Prime Minister came out in public and articulated the government’s support for getting a deal done. I believe she used, I could check on this...