Daryl Dolynny

Historically, lease arrangements and the length of terms of airport lands have been nothing short of a dog’s breakfast in design. Can the Minister indicate to the House what is his department prepared to do to encourage tenant growth and meet the growing needs of current leaseholders on all our airport lands?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am pleased to know that there has been some recent work looking at the amendments to our current Public Airports Act to harmonize it with other acts. Another area which has been grey for some time is the clarity and the authority around the disposal of assets on airport land that has plagued the Department of Transportation for many years. Finally, the issue of Yellowknife Airport governance has been mulled over many times in the past 20 years, yet it appears we are no further ahead in trying to maximize our economic benefits for Northerners.

My question today for the...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The issue of workplace safety comes under this activity summary, and with that my question goes to the Minister here. What does the GNWT do, specifically the Department of HR, to support a culture of safety within the GNWT?

I guess it’s a simple question. Again, we know that if the department feels that it’s had the right number of people working within that department I will abide by his stewardship. The question is that we knew, the department knew that this collective bargaining increase was imminent. It wasn’t as if this was something that was coming out of thin air. We know every year there’s an increase. What is the department doing to mitigate that increase to offset so that we’re not increasing our forced growth expenditures by 2.9 percent? What could we have done differently to bring our expenditure...

Just so I can get proper clarification, the Member here wasn’t asking for detail reports from each of the respective departments. The Member is asking for a template of what type of report is available that describes the type of information that could be extracted if asked for. I just have to get a feeling for what PeopleSoft can offer, and I need to get a feel exactly what are the parameters of reporting available to us so that we as Members or committee can provide the proper oversight and transparency for public dollars. That was my question as I think we needed clarification on that.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’d just like to continue on my questions here regarding this activity under the topic of overtime. I agree with what I’m hearing here today. But what steps does the Department of HR provide all the other departments in helping all the managements apply that the overtime rules are applied consistently? What tools are being used by HR to provide that?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I would like to welcome the Minister and the department here today. I’m going to start off by saying, I’m just going to quote a passage out of the opening comments here and it says that we are seeing an increase of $688,000, or 2.9 percent, versus last year. Now, just that number alone shows me, are we controlling expenditures? As we heard in the operational budget address, we want to keep our expenditures in line with revenues. Here is another classic example. I’m going to be putting every department on notice on this very concept. If we’re going to do blanket...

In the fulsome of time, I will leave it at that. I’ll be following up with this during the course of the year.

I only ask my final comment, does the department communicate all aspects of this occupational health and training in terms of how the government will be undertaking a revitalization, from what I’m hearing, as their safety culture? The only reason I say this is that I fear that we have a number of court cases pending within our territorial court system in which we are defending our four walls. We’ve lost one case already. We’ve been fined heavily and received a scathing report from...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Again, we’re hearing in progress. You know what? This is just ridiculous. All Northerners were led to believe that our use of southern facilities for withdrawal management and addiction treatments were to be temporary. The Minister is even quoted in saying, “We have not lost sight of the need to develop NWT-specific options of our approach to addressing addictions.”

Can the Minister elaborate as to when we can see and expect a NWT-specific residential addictions treatment facility based in the North and run by Northerners?

My final question, Mr. Chair. As we heard earlier from the Minister on his paid political announcement that we have a program forthcoming with respect to some form of a safety training program that is somewhat coming down in the immediate future here, would we be seeing this program implemented before the life of the 17th Legislative Assembly? Thank you.