David Ramsay

Mr. Speaker, well, if the Minister is adamant that’s the case, how come the last government and how come this government isn’t going back out to stakeholders and trying to find out exactly what the building of the Deh Cho Bridge will do to the cost of living here in the North Slave Region? How come they haven’t gone out and done that and talked to stakeholders, Mr. Speaker?

Mr. Speaker, I'd like to speak today about the reduction and reinvestment exercise currently being undertaken by the government.

The Premier has said that this is a new way of doing business, and indeed it is. I agree with the government taking a look at spending. As I've said, our current spending levels are not sustainable, and something needs to happen.

Whether, in fact, this is the right approach is debatable. What I am having difficulty with is how the government is entering into this whole reduction and reinvestment scheme without getting a baseline or an analysis done of information first...

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...

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...

I’m just wondering, in this process we have, how we would arrive at a figure of $41.5 million for the renovations at ’École St. Joseph. Is that just a number we pull out of thin air, or who does the estimation for that? Do we work with the school board in trying to determine what that number is, what it should be, how you get there? To me, it’s like you might as well just reach into the sky and yank a number out and put it on paper, because this number is nowhere near what was proposed before, Mr. Chairman.

Again, I just want to ask: how do we arrive at these numbers?