David Ramsay

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We’ve had a great deal of discussion on the program delivery officers at North Slave Correctional Centre. I won’t go over everything again, but suffice it to say, I believe there’s some question on this side of the House whether or not the frequency and the reliability of programming at that centre is going to be impacted as a result of these two program delivery officers being let go. I also wanted to say again for the record, I believe decisions like this fly in the face of the government’s overall goal of having safer communities. Without programming, quality...

My fear is that if there is no coverage on the weekends, inmates are going to want to go to the hospital. If they need to go to the hospital, they are going to go to the hospital, and when they go to the hospital, there is going to have to be a guard or two guards with them when they go. Vacant position or not, I think we need to have coverage at that facility on the weekends.

Mr. Chairman, I guess the other thing I wanted to talk about was the reduction in the nursing position at North Slave Correctional Centre. There is not going to be any coverage on the weekends, I’m to understand, because of this reduction.

I’m wondering if the department has done any work on trying to figure out what it’s going to cost. We’ve all been to the emergency room at Stanton. It can take six to eight hours to get in to see a doctor there. If that’s going to take a corrections guard out of that facility with an inmate to go to the hospital on the weekends to see a doctor, a nurse...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I’d like to make a statement regarding the budget process and affected employees. I still am not clear on where Cabinet got the direction or the brainwave to send out notification letters to employees without first properly consulting Regular Members. We’ve talked of this before: it took them three weeks — and I’d like to know what happened in that three-week period — where Regular Members were left out there answering phone calls from constituents without any knowledge of the notification letters and where they were going. This was also months before the actual...

Mr. Chairman, before we go to the vote on this, I did want to close out the discussion. I think what you see in this motion runs through this entire discussion that we’re having on the ’08–09 budget. It’s no fault of the Justice Minister; it’s no fault of the departmental staff. The reductions that are proposed to take place have not been well thought out, have not been well planned, have not been well communicated, and that is the fundamental issue that I have. Some of the other Regular Members share those concerns, Mr. Chairman.

It’s all nice and good for the Minister to say that there is a...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I move that this committee strongly recommends that government take immediate action to reinstate funding in the amount of $45,000 for the proposed reduction of two program delivery officers at North Slave Correctional Centre under the Department of Justice, under the Community Justice and Corrections Activity.

Does that mean there will be full coverage at that facility over the weekend?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t want to cover a lot of the ground. I agree with what my colleagues Mr. Bromley and Mr. Abernethy are saying.

I’ve been here for just over four years, and I’ve seen the North Slave Correctional Centre go into the new building. I’ve had many discussions with the former Minister about the new approach to corrections: how it was going to be holistic, more healing, and how they were going to do some good things there.

I share the concerns of my colleagues that the program delivery officers are being taken out of the sexual offender and family violence programming...

Mr. Chairman, that’s information I could get a later time. If the Minister doesn’t have that at his disposal, that’s fine.

One other thing before I go — I’ve got a minute left. I just wanted to touch on the Hackett Report. One thing that was contained in the Hackett Report was…. When they looked at the business processes at the Department of Human Resources, one of the things that stuck out for me was, in an organization comparable in size to the GNWT they would need four times fewer employees to deliver services to the workforce. That always stuck in my mind. If a comparable-sized organization...

Mr. Chairman, I thank the Minister for that. I think it is only a matter of time before the aboriginal governments that are out there, and the ones that are going to settle land claims, begin drawing down their authorities and powers under the land claim agreements.

Any work the Government of the Northwest Territories can do at the onset, and that’s today…. If there’s some work already been done…. I think the more work we do in this regard, the better off we’ll be tomorrow in an effort to save us resources.

And that’s just the thing, Mr. Chairman: resources are scarce. In a territory the size of...