Daryl Dolynny

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Moving on with general comments, I have Mr. Hawkins.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Again, moving with general comments, I have Mr. Blake.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Bang on. I agree with you.

In my view, this government’s duplicitous free spending of its entire first installment of the resource revenues in this current budget is a clever maneuver to cover revenue loss, but sadly, it’s not so clear, from the Minister’s comments today, the need to find additional offset savings for the miscalculated taxation revenue.

That said, why is this Minister financing and not initiating a full court press of passive restraint initiatives in this current budget to find the much needed savings? Thank you.

Just to give the Minister a little clue on Peter Pan, it’s pixie dust, not fairy dust.

Can the Minister clearly indicate what savings were realized by using this FMB policy in the past for years? In other words, what total dollars were saved from 2010-2011, from 2011-2012 and from 2012-2013 by initiating this Passive Restraint Policy?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I want to talk about two words and those words are...not Highway 7…

---Laughter

…passive restraint. I am not referring to a self-locking seatbelt but rather some very slick language used by our Finance department.

So, before we can get to passive restraint, we have to understand a bit of the context. For starters, if you have not noticed, many Regular Members are concerned at the number of job vacancies facing this government, and if you are from a small community, you should be paying attention.

Yet other Members have asked how the dormant or inactive jobs continue...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Your committee has been considering Tabled Document 22-17(5), Northwest Territories Main Estimates 2014-2015, and would like to report progress with one motion being adopted. Mr. Speaker, I move that the report of Committee of the Whole be concurred with. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Mr. Stewart.

Thank you. Moving on with our agenda, we have Health and Social Services. With that, we will go to the Minister of Health and Social Services for opening comments. Mr. Abernethy.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’d like to welcome the Minister and the NWT Housing Corporation staff here today. First and foremost, I want to say that I think, for the most part, Members were quite pleased with the direction NWTHC is taking. The review we did a number of months ago, we did not unveil a lot of earth-shattering issues, but there were certain things that I think we needed to look at and I wanted to basically echo some of those areas. Some of them were raised in today’s opening comments by the Minister and others were not, so I will be dipping back and forth here just so you can capture...

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. We’ll just take a minute and circulate this motion. The motion is in order.