Michael Miltenberger

The Water Strategy was developed in consultation and partnership with the Aboriginal government. We have a committee that was set up to provide oversight to work with the territorial government. That role is carrying over in terms of what’s happening with the negotiations and there’s a cost to that. We, as well, want to make sure we have, when we have the actual negotiating team at the table, that there’s an Aboriginal representative there along with the territorial government representative. Those funds will be expended to fulfill those particular job requirements and obligations that we...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have with me the acting deputy minister of Finance, Sandy Kalgutkar.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We can go through key points on this list on page 303. The water unit staff have responsibility and involvement with the communities across the North and work on the ground in the communities across the North.

The Wilfred Laurier University contribution is, we partnered up and got, I think, $3 for the price of one or $2 for the price of one to a contribution agreement to do on-the-ground water research in the Northwest Territories on areas of significant interest and concern not only to Wilfred Laurier but to the Northwest Territories and the communities.

Source water...

I am here to present Supplementary Estimates (Infrastructure Expenditures), No. 2, 2011-2012. This document outlines an increase of $11.807 million for capital investment expenditures in the 2011-2012 fiscal year.

There are four items in the supplementary estimates:

$9.5 million for the Department of Education, Culture and Employment to advance funding approved for the Sir Alexander Mackenzie and Samuel Hearne Senior Secondary School replacement project, from 2012-13 to the 2011-12 fiscal year.

$1.729 million for the Department of Transportation to record previous contributions provided by the...

Yes, Mr. Chairman, we will have access to the money that’s available.

There is detail provided in terms of where this money is going to be spent. The Member is asking what these are for. A lot of it is based on getting people in place to do the work tied to the negotiations or the implementation side. Pick some of the areas. Contaminated sites coordinators, the minerals devolution work. There’s going to be a whole range of activities that these folks do tied to either the actual negotiations or to implementation. The two are linked and often there’s going to be significant overlap tied to the workload at where we are at any particular time. The detail is here.

I...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The money that’s before us is to carry us to March 31st. The additional information that the Member has asked for, the more detailed information, we’ll commit to get that to the Member, to this committee.

Once again, I’ll offer one fact here and then I’ll turn it over to the Premier. I’d point out that in supp one there was a number of dollars put aside for Aboriginal government participation and engagement, which was $1,266,025 in addition to further money that’s in this particular supplementary appropriation request.

Once again I’ll ask the Premier if he wants to elaborate or respond further to Mr. Krutko’s questions. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The issue of the financing of the boards and the dealing with surpluses has been an issue for some time. In order to respond to that in a planned, rational way, there was a change made to how surpluses, defining what a surplus is and how it can be accumulated, so that the rules have been clarified and put in place so that the new Surplus Retention Policy is going to be 1 percent of the revenues up to a maximum of $250,000. As well, we will provide committee members with the information. The work that was done on the budgets of the boards are all based on the audits...

The issue of the fire budget is one that I agree with the Member has come up on a regular basis. As we’ve discussed in the past, there was a decision made to fund it at the lower level and have them come back once they could demonstrate and had some idea of what the costs were going to be. There were some good suggestions from committee that we’ve made note of. For example, using a 10-year running average is one possible way to look at a more realistic fire budget. We’ll consider all those as we look at the upcoming budget year.

With regard to the health and social services system, once again I...