Floyd Roland

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I must say that in initially meeting with the new CEO for the Power Corporation it was refreshing. His experience in that sector of the business and dealing with many customers is, I think, a breath of fresh air, as I see it, in reaching out to our customers in the Northwest Territories. Again, I’ve had discussions with both the chair and the new CEO to discuss the issues around customer relations, and we’ll follow up on that, as well, to ensure that we work on improving that relationship. Thank you.

With the new CEO, Mr. Axford, in house now in the Northwest Territories, he’s been looking at the operations of the Power Corporation, their structure, how they deal with our customer issues and our response times, so I expect that in the near future I would sit down at the next board meeting with the CEO and the new chairman and the board to go over some of the work they’ve done and see what flows from that. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, the identification and the categorization of waste sites, those were decisions made by previous governments that, as I said, the preliminary work was done. Quite clearly, we leave the responsibility for decisions made by the federal government prior to the signing of the final agreement is their responsibility needing to go forward, but they still have to share that work with us and come up with a budget that we would have to negotiate on dealing with the full remediation of those sites or that they would remain holding onto the liability of those sites. For example, by signing...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member’s statement earlier, leading up to these questions, made a number of comments about secret negotiations and so on. I will say for the record that there were no secret negotiations. All bilateral discussions that may have happened between the GNWT and the federal government, specifically because there are areas that we clearly are for or would be, those issues and discussions were shared at the main table with all of the partners that were at the table.

As for signing this agreement, there are many things to be negotiated as we go forward. One of those is the...

Those that have made application, I will ask on the results. The first thing, as I had committed to earlier, was the total number of complaints or applications that were sent in, what were the responses to those applications and if there are any outstanding issues. I will get that information back to the Member. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Power Corporation does have a policy in place on dealing with customers who have had problems within their homes and can file a claim. I don’t have the level of detail with me that I could respond to the Member but I will get that for the Member. Thank you.

I know the funding that we’ve discussed, the portion for the GNWT and the portion for the Aboriginal governments through this agreement-in-principle signing, by signing on you get access to that. The portion for Aboriginal governments, they need to sit down with the federal government and work out that arrangement. We don’t have an affect on that. As we go forward towards a full set of negotiations, even ourselves as the GNWT, we’re going to have to look at our resources available and come up with a formula as to how we would progress forward and see if the federal government would be...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The agreement-in-principle allows for groups to sign on at any time during the process, once they feel comfortable and they feel that they understand it more, if that’s a concern they have. In some cases, some groups may choose not to be there. It is a choice that they will need to make.

We will, as the agreement-in-principle states, allowed for every opportunity right through up until the final negotiations have been reached in the sense of initialling a final agreement for decision. The groups that would be a part of that can influence it.

That’s why I say come back to...

The work that was done by the anti-poverty group had a preliminary focus. Yes, the government was involved in the workshop at our request, but, quite simply, the fact that as the GNWT a number of departments... And yes, the reason that we include Executive, Health and Social Services, Education, Culture and Employment, ITI and Justice as part of the review of this is to knock those silos down and we have to look at the way that we’ve delivered those programs and come back and correlate that with the work that was done by the NGOs and come out with recommendations that would fit at that point...

Well, yes, quite simply, Mr. Speaker, the issue comes when in past experience within the Government of the Northwest Territories when we have a large working group together to look at the issues within the North and there are a number of issues that we have examples of, this is one of those, the Anti-Poverty Strategy. The work they’ve done is good. It was good to get the information together from those that help deliver and deal with those issues on their own. We also, as a Government of the Northwest Territories, deal with those issues and we can’t forget that as well, and we need to collect...