Robert C. McLeod

We have heard that concern. First of all, I don’t think there’s a community that will not respond to an issue or an accident or a call from outside their municipal boundary, because their priority, obviously, is the safety of people first. They will respond knowing that it could cost them money and then they wonder about the billing part of it. We have heard that concern and I think we are doing a review of the Highway Emergency Alerting Protocol. But I just wanted to make the point that I have not heard of any municipality turning down a request for assistance because it’s outside their...

Actually, Mr. Chair, the Member, I think, said he would save his questions for detail once we get to those specific areas, so we will look forward to having the discussion.

As I was saying before, we have done a lot of work. We’re looking for some feedback from committee and then I think the contractor has done a lot of good work for us. My understanding is these are all complete and we will have some time with committee to get some feedback from committee and, after that, make a determination if it’s feasible to try and implement this during the life of the 17th. There would be some money attached to it, obviously. It more than likely will be a transition issue, but the work is completed and we will provide committee with an update. Thank you.

I do, Mr. Chair.

We do have a capacity issue. I think we said that. That’s why we re-profiled a position internally, to help deal with some of the workload. Right now I think we have maybe two people who are dealing with legislation that we have to bring forward. We’ve added another one internally, so that should help us take care of some of the backlog and some of the outstanding legislation. We do have a capacity issue right now, but we’re taking steps to deal with it and hope to be able to move forward once everybody gets up to speed. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The NWT has a lot of natural athletes. I have heard that a number of times. We just don’t have the benefits of some of our larger jurisdictions’ level of competition.

The Member makes a good point and there may be some merit to that. One of our sporting partners is actually looking at something along those lines, the centre of excellence Program, or we would have a number of our higher performing athletes in one central place. There is some merit to that. We’ve asked for a business case as to how to move this forward. I don’t think it’s something that’s going to happen...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We’ll commit to getting a list of some of our vacant positions as far as SAOs go. We do have a number of training positions where we have local people training to be SAOs through, I think, the School of Community Government and LGANT, so we’ll supply that information to committee. That way they have good knowledge of who’s being trained and from which communities.

Mr. Chair, our department would work closely with ENR on identifying and remediation of sites. Again, some of these sites were inherited. We have to learn from that. As we go forward, we’re working on putting a regime in place where we can stay away from issues like this and through the financial assurances division and security that’s required. Back in the day they just went pretty well anywhere they wanted to go, but times have changed and we’re responsible for the administration of our land in the Northwest Territories. We have the tools in place to help us deal with that and we’re going to...

Yes, our plan is to do an evaluation of this and which communities had taken us up on it and whether it’s increased the number of volunteers. Especially in the smaller communities, your core volunteer group is basically the same and there are some new people that come on. Having the opportunity to be in a number of these small communities and seeing what their volunteer core group is like, you see it during events that go on in the community. The fact that we have earmarked a few dollars to help recognize some of the contributions of these people I think will go a long way to increasing...

Yes, I do, Mr. Chair. Thank you.