Jackson Lafferty

There have been numerous discussion and consideration taking into account a number of factors when deciding when and where the reduction will happen, including where the positions were initially established, with the funding and the current client caseload again. So, yes, to answer the Member’s question, these have all been taken into consideration when we were deciding.

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. As Members know, the transfer of the positions back to NWT Housing Corporation on the Public Housing Rental Subsidy has been active. As a result, there has been a loss of administration dollars within our Department of ECE. ECE is required to reduce the number of client services offices across the Northwest Territories. Those individuals were also handling the case of public subsidy units, public housing rental subsidy area, and then at the same time the client services officers were responsible for income security. Now the responsibility is with NWT Housing Corporation so...

Mr. Speaker, we’re definitely open to discuss any potential opportunities with respect to a facility or programming. We did have a meeting in the past. I’m sure those individuals or organizations are listening to these House proceedings, so by all means, if they want to meet with us as the Department of Education, Culture and Employment, we are more than willing to meet with them. Mahsi.

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. The college campus itself has been in discussion for quite some time now. We’re fully aware that the lease is up in 2012, and we are working towards possibly extending the lease until we have a plan in place. We probably have to do that anyway, because it will take a few years to develop a plan of action and then find a suitable location, if that needs to happen.

Mr. Speaker, this is an area where we met with several other potential partners as well. We’ve had numerous discussions with different organizations on how we can move forward. This is an ongoing piece of work that...

Our GNWT and ECE are supportive of having more NPs in the Northwest Territories. We will continue to have this discussion with Health and Social Services on what kind of options are there. If there’s a budget issue or financial issue or program delivery is an issue, a number of students are in the program so those are discussions that we need to have. We have had contacts within the last couple of weeks, so we’ll continue to do that. With progress, we’ll let the Members know.

Part of our plan of the Department of Education, Culture and Employment, working closely with Health and Social Services and also the college, is to continue delivering this program. If there are any changes in the program delivery or if there is an issue with the funding, then we definitely need to sit down and discuss our objectives and options and we’ll definitely let the Members know if there are any changes.

I appreciate that the Member is persistent. At the same time, we have to look at the caseload. If there is an increase in the caseload for a client services officer to perform extra duty on income security, this is an area we can definitely look at. We will seriously monitor the caseloads in the region.

Yes, there have been other positions such as client services officers in a number of communities across the Northwest Territories that fill similar positions. Full-time/part-time employment status is determined also on the clientele caseloads.

I also met with the Board of Governors on that same day, probably before or after Mr. Hawkins. We talked about the same issue. My understanding is that the Board of Governors will bring an idea forward to our attention within the ECE department. So we are waiting for the Board of Governors to bring us information that we can work on. Mahsi.

Mr. Speaker, there has been a couple meetings a few years back on potential partners, private partners, organizations, but the information has been brought back to our attention as we need to move forward. Those are the discussions that we’ve had in the past and we are open to ideas and suggestions on how we can move forward. There have been talks about having possibly a First Nations organization build a facility for us and lease it back to the GNWT. That was an option that was thrown at us, but we haven’t seen anything as a proposal or anything that we can move forward on.

Mr. Speaker, this...