Glen Abernethy

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

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to confirm that the Government of the Northwest Territories’ new Reservist Leave Policy allows public service employees to take unpaid time off to serve with the Canada Reserve Force, part of the Canadian Forces.

The Canadian Reserve Force is made up of volunteers who serve with the Canadian military while maintaining civilian jobs or studies. Reservists have made substantial contributions to Canada’s domestic and international operations and the number of reservists in service has grown significantly across the country. The number of NWT reservists has increased...

I mean, I completely understand my colleague’s point about spreading the benefits and trying to be a leader. To some degree, I mean, we wait for where we know we can get supplied before we go in, because we’re not a supplier of pellets but we want to support the industry. We will go in where there is limited use of pellets, but at least some supply, and us being there, having additional demand, demonstrates that this technology works here in the Northwest Territories and that others can certainly build upon it. Example: We are putting biomass in some of the schools and some of the other places...

March 31st is basically the end of the three months, so we will have a better sense within a month. With respect to are we planning to take on any additional health or education boards, I will go to Ms. Gault.

That’s what BIP does. Under this particular process, we have to apply BIP, where appropriate, and the contractors or potential contractors, when they’re submitting their bids, must identify the local vendors that they’re going to use in all situations. If they are going to be using local hotels, they have to identify the companies they are using, that they qualify under BIP.

As far as monitoring, we require regular reports from the vendors, the successful proponents on compliance with the contract that we sign with them, which makes specific reference to the individuals they would have...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s a good question. Unfortunately, I don’t know if a room exists where this information can be displayed and shared. You’re right; the “G” Division has a long and distinguished history here in the Northwest Territories, from the lost patrol of Rat River, the Mad Trapper, travel up and down the Mackenzie River, travel into the Eastern Arctic when it was part of “G” Division. There is a real solid history here.

I have had an opportunity to travel to a number of the detachments and I’ve been in the detachments. Many of the officers in those buildings actually have a real...

I think, as a government, we’re already doing much of that. If you look at the buildings we’re building, we’re building them to meet or exceed some of the national building codes. We’re utilizing technology that is available to us to help us control costs and leave less of a footprint. But I hear what the Member’s saying and as we move forward with the Green Procurement Policy, I will make sure that his comments are considered and utilized where possible.

Right now contracts are administered by not just Public Works and Services, they’re administered by every department to some degree. Within Public Works and Services, the contracts awarded in ’12-13, by way of summary, to date, the Public Works and Services has only done 59 sole-source contracts, which is about 2.2 percent of all the contracts; 82.2 have gone out for request of proposal, and in 2013-13 none have been negotiated and we’ve got 199, or 14.3 percent, tendered. So very, very few within Public Works and Services are actually sole-source.

There are criteria for sole-source contracts...

Thank you, Madam Chair. With respect to litigation, individuals looking to bring a lawsuit against somebody tend to throw large nets and try to capture as many people as they can. They’ll write as many names on the list as they can, hoping to catch somebody. We have bonds in place, we have contracts in place and our dealings are with the primaries.

I’ll go to the deputy for some specifics on that, but by way of example, on this particular contract we knew we were doing a teardown on a building and we knew we needed to know what the risks were in that building by way of contaminants such as asbestos and whatnot. The contractor we hired to do the assessment so that we would have the information that we needed to go out for proposal for tender on that project, missed a number of items which, unfortunately, resulted in a couple of the change orders. This isn’t something that happens to us on a regular basis. We usually get pretty solid...