Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. More of a comment for clarification, but I’ll go to the Minister anyway. Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Minister McLeod. General comments on the bill, Mr. Ramsay.

I’m quite pleased to hear that autism and programs in the North for autistic children will be on the transition document going into the 17th Assembly. What I was asking is that the Minister is going to be the Minister for the next couple of months, regardless of the election. There’s a great opportunity for the Minister to direct his staff to start doing some research into the alternate programs that exist in southern Canada. Every jurisdiction in this country offers programming for autistic children except the Northwest Territories. I’m asking that he in the interim have his department start...

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Committee agree?

Mr. Speaker, your committee has been considering Bill 7, Community Planning and Development Act, and Bill 19, Cost of Credit Disclosure Act, and would like to report progress with one motion being adopted, and that Bill 19 is ready for third reading, and that Bill 7 is ready for third reading. Mr. Speaker, I move that the report of Committee of the Whole be concurred with.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. With me today is Kelly McLaughlin, legislative counsel with the Department of Justice.

I do, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon. I’m happy to be here today to present to the committee Bill 21, An Act to Amend the Employment Standards Act. This bill provides members of the Reserves Force with an entitlement to unpaid leave from their employment when they’re required to be absent from work for the purpose of service with the force. This bill also prohibits an employer from terminating an employee or changing the conditions of his or her employment because an employee is a member of the Reserves Force.

There are approximately 620 Reserves Force members in the Northwest...

That’s fantastic news. I’m very happy to hear that.

The second part of this issue is the fact that there were well over 200 elective surgeries cancelled over the last couple of months, basically since January when all of these issues started to come up. I’m curious what type of communication plan or what kind of implementation plan Stanton is putting in place to get this backlog of elective surgeries through the system as quickly as possible.

The reason this is important, Mr. Speaker, is there are costs to people, their health, their livelihood, all of these things are affected by these...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services and are a follow-up to my Member’s statement from earlier today.

In July, I believe, the Minister made an announcement that August 12th was the date that Stanton was targeting to resume elective surgeries once they were able to confirm that the sterilization equipment was in fact working to standard. I was very optimistic that would happen and I actually hope that that did happen, but I heard a rumour that, in fact, the elective surgeries have not been recommenced as a result or due to the fact that...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to thank the Members for their comments and support. With respect to Mr. Krutko’s comments, when we did take the bill out, I did go to the military and to the reserve units, and some of those individuals that we had talked to had a significant amount of experience with Rangers throughout the Northwest Territories. We also did go to the NWT Chamber of Commerce to get their perspective from a territorial perspective.

The Member is right, though; it would have been beneficial to go to some of the local governments to get their input, and in the future I would...