Jane Groenewegen

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, this technical review that I am making reference to with respect to the Diamond Jenness Secondary School in Hay River was completed in August 2006. Might I compliment the Department of Public Works and Services for actually a very comprehensive and thorough review of the school. However, I don’t know what has been done with this information since. There aren’t too many pieces of infrastructure or buildings that would be allowed to go into this state of disrepair. There are health issues. There are safety issues. There are code issues. This is a...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I move that we report progress.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We are going to save our questions until after our comments, so we have a cast of thousands of questions over here. Just kidding. That is what we decided to do. I am not sure if Members have any questions or not. There is one question I do have. I would just like to ask the Premier -- I probably should have asked this on the day you ran for Premier and not today; it is a bit late now -- I hope there is going to be a real culture of working together. You talk about change. There is one thing that is very quickly within our ability as 19 Members to change here. I...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I think this is a matter of some urgency. As the Minister herself has indicated, there are areas that are not really legally anybody’s responsibility to cover and if there is a motor vehicle accident or some catastrophe outside of our communities, the pressure is on the communities to respond, but it’s not really within their resources or their ability to do that. I would like to ask the Minister when she refers to the patchwork approach, for example, two comparable sized communities, Inuvik and Hay River, what is the contribution to those communities for...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, over the last few years, it’s been raised in this House numerous times the issue around ambulance services and emergency response services in communities and the areas surrounding communities. Mr. Speaker, I think that everybody probably south of Inuvik is waiting with great anticipation to see what the government’s position is going to be. It was an interdepartmental approach to a review that was done between the Department of Health and Social Services and the Department of Transportation, I believe. Particularly in Hay River now, we have a critical need...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Might I say that I will not be very happy if we are going back into the line-up for capital projects, not considering that we are talking about Fort Smith, Yellowknife and all of these competing interests for capital dollars. I want to make sure that Hay River stays at the front of the line on this. I would like to ask the Minister’s commitment on that. Thank you.

Okay, I am not liking that word flux stage, Mr. Speaker. We had a $14 million capital commitment from this government for either the renovation or replacement of the hospital in Hay River. Has the decision definitely been made that we are talking about a replacement versus a renovation? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. At times, we do talk about a one-window approach, Mr. Speaker, to those types of services and also Community Futures also has an office located downtown. It would be an interesting concept when we look at the other ITI presence in the downtown core to put things at one location and the coordination that might result from that. So again, I would ask the Minister, what kind of a timeline will he be looking at and hearing back from ENR what their current and projected needs are? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement, Mr. Speaker, I mentioned that there were many, many questions that have arisen in our community with respect to the tragic loss of an RCMP member. We plan to reconvene a meeting a January. Again, we hope to have some answers at that meeting, but I also think it would be good to have some representatives of the departments there to interact with the people in our community directly. I’d like to ask the Minister if he would be amenable to himself personally coming there and talking about the issue of policing in our community in January....

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, has any formal work been done to assess whether or not the current space does have enough capacity to accommodate ENR and ITI? It is quite apart from an inconvenience for anybody who wants to see an economic development officer, for example, having to go all the way out to Mile 5. Has there been any assessment done of those needs? There are also seasonal people who come in with ENR who also use that same location office. So I would like to know what formal work has been done to identify whether those offices at Mile 5 are adequate. Thank you.