Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. On June 2, 2009, the Minister of Human Resources committed to increasing the representation of persons living with disabilities in the GNWT public service. To accomplish this, the department and the Minister initiated several actions. These include the creation of an Advisory Committee on Employability, the implementation of a diversity officer to help counsel persons with disabilities through the GNWT hiring process, inclusion of specific references in job ads to applicants asking them to identify that they live with a disability and may require accommodation, and...

The Minister actually hit on the second part. After I talked about music, I was going to say there is a significant amount of other product. In looking at it, can the Minister commit to putting together some sort of package that is easily accessible to people so that they can see or even listen to some of the product, even maybe link to some of the artists’ websites so that more people can get a wider range of an idea of what some of our fantastic northern artists, performing artists, musicians, painters, writers, authors are doing?

We should be very proud of the product that exists and the...

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister Lafferty.

Thank you. That is excellent. I imagine that is a several-year project and that is not going to happen right away. Do we know what the $200,000 specifically is going to be used for? Do we know what display we are creating, which region is going to be represented with that $200,000?

Thank you. Thanks to the Minister for that. That is excellent. I think partnerships are important and I look forward to hearing more about that. In the design of these current displays, if you can start thinking about transportation, it might help all to the design to make travel in the future easier. Just a thought.

The other thing that I have a question about is, once upon a time we housed a significant number of artefacts and materials that I think were considered to be Nunavut’s and we were housing them at the museum and I think out at the warehouse as well. I have been told that a lot of...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have just one quick question on this section. Ultimately the number of positions appears to be going up, but there is some drop in position numbers in some of the regional areas. For instance, in the Deh Cho... No, that one is right. Overall, it looks like we have gone down by three. Never mind. I was reading the wrong line and I got myself good and properly confused.

In regional area offices in the department, it has gone down from 54 to 50, whereas the total number of positions in the department has gone up from 191 to 195. Often you hear conversation in this House...

Thank you. Once again, I appreciate the Minister’s response, but I come back to this example. The person was told that they weren’t getting the job after they passed and the references were good and they were told that Stanton would not accommodate this person’s disability. So we know it’s happening. Does the department have any recourse where a department clearly isn’t abiding by the rules? Does the department have any recourse or ability to make sure that departments do adhere to the policies and procedures of this government? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister responsible for HR. As far as HR plans go, Brilliant North 20/20 is a pretty good document, in my opinion. It goes a long way to increasing the representation of persons living with disabilities in the GNWT public service. But as outlined in my example earlier today, clearly not all department boards and agencies are supporting the government direction on hiring persons with disabilities; in particular, accommodating those individuals. So I’m wondering if the Minister could tell me what he and his department are doing to ensure that...

That’s great. Maybe if the Minister can provide me with some data on how far those records go back, because I know there’s product from three, four, five, seven, eight, nine, 10 years. It would be great to go back and capture some of the stuff we’ve done, so if the Minister can provide me that, that would be great. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The first section here, NWT Arts Council, is $500,000. This is where we give money to groups that are obviously interested in producing some sort of project, whether it is music, whether it is writing or whatnot.

In this area, I know that over the years we have done a really fantastic job of putting some money into the hands of some of our artists throughout the Northwest Territories, but we haven’t always done a brilliant job of sort of collecting or recognizing what has been accomplished by these artists. For instance, we have had many CDs produced by many talented...