David Ramsay

I’ll ask some questions of the Minister of Transportation, given the sensitivity on this question of the Deh Cho Bridge.

I would like to ask the Minister of Transportation: how much money has the Department of Transportation spent in terms of contractors and consultants on the Deh Cho Bridge project over the last five years?

Yeah, and I’ll throw that out. Do you know where I got that number of $242 million? I’ll tell you where I got that. I got it from research.

Interjection.

It sounds like the Minister is aware of the practice that is currently at play at Human Resources and he condones that.

I’d like to ask the Minister if he could commit to an outside review — a staffing review — of HR so that we can get an outside expert in there to talk to the staff that are at HR, so that they could let us know in a more formalized manner exactly what is happening there.

Mr. Speaker, the problem with that, I believe, is that staff at Human Resources are afraid to speak out. They need an avenue where they can feel they have some protection so that there are not reprisals against them, that they won’t lose their job. That’s the state of affairs there at Human Resources.

I’d like to ask the Minister: is it government policy that employees leave passwords for their computers with management, Mr. Speaker? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It would seem absurd to ask Human Resources to conduct a human resources review of its own department, but that is the reality, and that’s what I’ll be asking for today.

I support the motion that’s before us today, like I supported the motion that the last Assembly passed in this House calling on the government to return social housing policy and the money back to the Housing Corporation where it belongs.

I’ve got constituents, too, who have a great deal of concern. I know my colleague Mr. Menicoche outlined some of them. The assessments are taking too long.

As I’ve said before, one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen, being a Member of this House, is how this all happened in the first place. I think what happened was the Minister went to an FPT meeting, saw...

Mr. Speaker, I made mention in my Member’s statement of offices being searched on the weekend for files. I wonder if this is common practice across the government. When employees go home on Friday afternoon in other departments, are they expected to have their offices searched on the weekend and then have to account for what’s in their office or not in their office on Monday morning? Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, my questions today are for the Minister of Human Resources. I’ve been a Member of the House for over four years, and early on in the life of the 15th Legislative Assembly one of the first things I took on was the staff concerns at North Slave Correctional Centre. I stood up here in the House day in and day out and told the Minister what was going on at North Slave Correctional Centre. He was adamant that nothing was going on at North Slave Correctional Centre, and we all know what happened after HR went in there and did a thorough analysis of what was happening: there were 68...

Mr. Speaker, three years ago the 15th Legislative Assembly consolidated Human Resources into a centralized delivery model.

As Members know, there were, and still are, a great deal of growing pains as the government shifts its Human Resources processes to this model. Former employees, when trying to retire, were waiting months and sometimes more than a year to receive their documentation from HR. There were, and continue to be, problems with PeopleSoft, and a well-known breach happened last year. As well, there is an inherited backlog that still exists in the department today.

The department...

I move that $115,000 be deleted from the Interim Appropriation Detail book — that amount set out in Schedule 2, Capital Investment Expenditures, item No. 3, Public Works and Services, on page 6, for the project Final Records Processing and Storage Facility.