Glen Abernethy

Public Works and Services obviously has some responsibility in paying bills and tracking those types of things, but for some more detail on where our power load is coming from, I will go to the deputy minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Give me a second here and I’ll get the breakdown of positions. As we’re looking for the actual specifics, we’ve got a number of petroleum products division staff. We’ve got a couple located here in Yellowknife, including the director, but the vast majority of the staff in the petroleum products division is located in Fort Simpson, in the Deh Cho. We’re still looking for the exact numbers. Once we get that, we’d be happy to provide that to you.

As Members know, when it comes to the petroleum products division, we work on a cost-recovery basis, not a profit basis where the...

I don’t believe that is the case, but for specifics we’ll go to the deputy.

As indicated previously, we now have three years of baseline data on the facilities that we’re responsible for. This information didn’t exist previously so if there had been a spike in a school, the school may not necessarily know what caused that spike or why that was occurring. We can now monitor buildings on a constant and regular basis and if we see a spike, we see it early and we can get into the building to try and figure out what is actually causing the spike.

By way of an example, using the school as an example, it could be a faulty fan or a faulty motor that’s running all the time when...

There are a number of categories of harassing behaviour covered under this policy and they include harassment, personal harassment, sexual harassment and abuse of authority. The policy also has an accompanying guide to apply to the policy which reflects current practices and processes for informal and formal complaint resolutions, demonstrates management, encouragement of prevention and resolution of conflict through frank communication, speaks to management and employees about roles and responsibilities in creating and maintaining respectful workplaces, and helps identify the manager’s role...

There may be some opportunities for some cooperation here, but there are a couple things that we have to remember. Many of the buildings that Public Works and Services manages tend to be larger; schools, jails, office buildings; larger facilities that would require a different skill set than, say, a home, which the Housing Corp may be administering. I’m certainly willing to have that conversation with the Minister responsible for the Housing Corporation to see if there are any advantages, but it may not be as cut and dried as that. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, the lead on the Mackenzie Valley fibre optic link is actually the Department of Finance. We see ourselves as being a potential client. Right now, actually it was late in the life of the 16th Assembly, early in the life of the 17th Assembly, the department managed to obtain an agreement on a more formal and greater degree of bandwidth, which I think has helped a lot of the GNWT programs and services. Different departments have different requirements for bandwidth based on the programming they have in place. We have all heard about the challenges the health system is facing with...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will go to the deputy for some specifics, but just a reminder to committee that we deal with a huge range of contracts from small capital to larger capital to, sort of, more administrative contracts. So everyone would be slightly different. We’d use the same policies and procedures, but for specifics I’ll go to the deputy.

It may not be the best example because that is a leased building not an owned and operated building. If the property manager or the owner of the building were to come to us indicating that the power bills were going up, we would certainly deal with that through property management and talk to the department to get a sense of why the cost is so high. I think normally that’s how we would deal with that situation.

For owned and operated buildings we would have those discussions with the department. Many of our buildings have controls on them so that we can actually turn off lights at certain hours...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Member nailed it. That’s Stanton.