Robert C. McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, we agree that our folks in the communities need to understand their roles as well and the responsibilities they have to ensure that they have the proper capacity to deal with the lot of money that they are having to deal with because they do have a lot of responsibility with us giving them all their CPI money and with their O and M. Our role, we see, is to assist these community governments. Through the accountability framework, we believe that, as I said earlier on in the session, that gives us the opportunity to identify any red flags and pick out any issues...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Member is correct. That would have to be an amendment to the legislation to change the amount. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We had eight vacancies as of March 31st. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I take the Member’s point. I mean, there’s a discussion that we should sit down with committee and get some input from committee as to what some of their recommendations are. If there’s a design of the program issue then we’ll have to address that. This is an issue that’s been on people’s radars for a while so I think it would be prudent of us to sit down with committee, get some feedback and go away and maybe come back with a redesigned program working with committee. But I will commit to that process. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, we’ve contributed just over $2.1 million towards that. I think it was a $38-million funding gap that was identified through the work of the formula funding review, which actually was supposed to start at the beginning of the 18th Assembly, but it was decided in the 17th Assembly that we’d initiate that work, so it would help us to identify some of the shortfalls that we’ve been hearing about from the communities and find ways we can address it. This year we’ve contributed $2.1 million towards that, and as our fiscal situation improves, we would be able to help...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, the CPI funding the Member is referring to is not touched. It hasn’t changed. It will not change, unless we can increase it somehow in the future, but it’s been at $28,002,000 for a while. A lot of communities will use this money as cost share dollars for some of the Building Canada Plan projects. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That money was a reduction to the contribution to NWTAC. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, the RMO1s were wellreceived, and we have them all filled. They're all filled with local people. I think three of the five or four of the five are female. We've had very good interest in that, actually. If there are, as part of the HR plan, you know, if there's further opportunities to offer training positions in the regions, then that's something that we'll take into consideration. We want to be able to build up the capacity in the region because who knows the region better than the folks that live there, right. We would like to try to build the capacity there...

We are always looking at ways that we can increase our funding, especially for the youth. I mean, I can tell this House that we've had five events, I think, in the last year or so and we spent close to $650,000 at these events, and some of this is O and M funding for staff time and such. So it is a program that, you know, we will look at ways to enhance once the evaluation has been completed, and we will work with committee members to see how we can incorporate into our business plans and main estimates going forward. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, we actually have some from the GNWT that were affected. Also some of the federal employees were affected as well. Thank you.