David Ramsay

Mr. Chair, this capital is in my riding. I agree with some of the previous speakers. The jail has been in operation now for a number of years, and I haven’t heard of anybody escaping from the young offenders unit or the North Slave Correctional Centre any time lately.

Maybe I could ask the Justice Minister: how many escapees have we had from the North Slave Correctional Centre? Or I could ask the Premier: how many escapees have we had from the North Slave Correctional Centre and the young offenders unit since they opened?

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.

Mr. Speaker, given the fact that the previous government was signing on to a $160 million infrastructure deal, I’m wondering what role the Finance Minister would play in that. The impact that’s going to have for 35 years to come is $242 million. The former Finance Minister is still the Finance Minister, and I think he has some explaining to do, Mr. Speaker.

The Members of the 15th Legislative Assembly put a lot of faith in what the government was telling them at the time. The former Premier said he would come forward with information that was going to be contained in that concession agreement before it was signed off. That never happened. The concession agreement was signed on September 28, 72 hours before the election, Mr. Speaker.

I want to ask the Premier if he is aware of whether or not the former Premier and cabinet had access to the cost-benefit analysis when Regular Members first found out any information — a little bit of information — on...

I’m going to speak today about the Deh Cho Bridge project.

I’m very concerned that the government is so far into this project that it now can’t even begin to estimate what it would cost for us to get out of it.

Regular Members of the 15th Legislative Assembly passed two motions in this House — one in May of last year and the other in August — demanding an updated economic analysis and some detail on the concession agreement before it was signed.

Mr. Speaker, we had assurances from the Premier that we would have that type of information prior to the government signing off on that project. As we...

Mr. Speaker, my questions today are for the Premier. It gets back to my Member’s statement, where I was talking about the reduction exercises currently underway and the information that’s flowing through to departments and not necessarily getting through to the Regular Members on this side of the House.

I’ve become aware of one department where they are doing hiring on a case-by-case basis. It’s not necessarily a hiring freeze but a case-by-case basis, and hiring has to be approved by the deputy minister. It’s a big change, Mr. Speaker.

I’d like to ask the Premier if that is a government-wide...

Mr. Chairman, just following up on my colleague Ms. Bisaro’s questions. If you look at the infrastructure upgrades and server replacements, currently the government has a policy whereby if the equipment is reaching the end of five years — an evergreen policy, I think, is how they refer to it — then that equipment is considered for replacement.

We haven't had that level of discussion yet. Maybe an exercise in looking at saving some money is extending the evergreen maybe six, maybe seven years before we look at replacement. Why would we go ahead with the upgrades without having made that...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to ask a question. I made reference to the contracts-over-$5,000 report that comes out. I think the Minister made reference to the fact that it comes from ITI. Could we not look at, like…? If we are going to spend $7.5 million on, finally and thankfully, getting this system up to a standard where you can actually do something with it, can’t we look at migrating the reports that are generated — like that contracts report — over to FMBS so that they can print it off in a format that’s useful for anybody looking at it?

Mr. Chairman, again, in an effort to reduce spending, I’m just wondering why we wouldn’t look at having one deputy minister for the department of the Executive. Then you wouldn’t require the DMs of the departments inside the department of the Executive, and you could do without ADMs and DMs at those levels as well — there and HR. Why don’t we do it with just one DM? That’s the question.

Mr. Chairman, I just have a question. It’s just backing up a little bit to the department of the Executive, if we could go back there. I seek unanimous consent to go back to the department of the Executive.

Unanimous consent granted.