Rylund Johnson

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll try and keep my comments brief considering we already agreed to this. I'm very happy to see the child care infrastructure fund. This is much needed money. I believe, though, we need something like $20 million to make up our infrastructure deficit to get to the requiredto place where all our communities have child care. And I know the previous fund was oversubscribed. And I'm hoping we can get this money out the door very quickly, and I know the department will do that. I guess I'm just looking for I know some of the previous applications didn't quite meet the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I guess I one day hope that there's a path forward where the Yellowknife DMV can look to do what most capitals across Canada and most, you know, government service officers in other jurisdictions do, which is have a portion of their hours be available, either on evenings or weekends, just for a small few hours for those people who cannot get time off work to make normal 9to5 hours. Is there any possibility of that happening, Mr. Speaker?

Yes, thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, I'm glad to hear that. I think it's much needed for a lot of our tourism operators who are facing another very uncertain year about whether they will have any tourism.

I want to move on to the support for tourism accommodation relief program, the STAR program, which is $3.2 million for hotels and accommodations. I guess I also have similar concerns for this in that the vast majority of hotel rooms in the NWT are in Yellowknife; the majority of those hotel rooms are owned by very large hotel chains who, you know, certainly do not reside  or not owned by...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I believe it was yesterday in the House, the Minister of Justice was talking about integrated service delivery and the goal being to, you know, make government processes designed for the people and not necessarily what is easiest for government. For almost a year now, the Yellowknife department of motor vehicles has not accepted walkin appointments. You have to get an appointment. I've had numerous constituent issues regarding this. So my I believe this is clearly easier for the department to run it that way but not necessarily the public. So my question for the...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I guess I'll start with the one for licensed tourism operators, $2.5 million. I'm glad to see this. I think tourism bailout or assisting our tourism operators is much needed funding. And I'm glad to see the GNWT do this of their own initiative. I think to date, we've been waiting on a lot of federal programs and these are designed to kind of fill some of those gaps. So I'm going to vote in favour of the money. I just had some questions about how it is spent.

Of the $2.5 million for tourism operators, how much of that do we expect to go to northern tourism operators...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Perhaps I'll save debate on the cost of ending poverty for another time. I just hope that the funds had some clear aims to be used for that.

There's $591,000 here for the phase 2 of the NWT's midwifery program. Can I just get a confirmation on when we expect those positions to actually be hired. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. There's $100,000 to the Child and Family Services contribution here. I believe the word "contribution" clarifies this, but this is not you know, the $40million budget of Child and Family Services, this will be given to the Foster Family Coalition to support foster families through their contribution agreement, is that correct?

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. I guess, you know, the first couple bailouts, I get, when their main concern is insolvency and keeping these essential routes open. But we're getting to the point where the government is clearing propping up these airlines, and I think some larger conversations have to happen about whether we're just going to keep pouring money into them without getting a seat at the shareholder table. And that was very much the Minister of Finance federally's point in taking six percent of Air Canada as part of their bailout, to make sure that they're at the shareholder table and...

Yes, thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, I struggle sometimes to understand the whole information system shared services and the IT world, but I also struggle to understand why it moves so slowly sometimes. I guess I'd like to narrow in a little here on the Mineral Administration Registry system, the MARS system. My understanding is that the $1.2 million carried over here is actually total of something about 4.5 million for our new mineral registry system. Can I get an update on when that will be complete and, more specifically, when we will have online MAP staking in the NWT. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm going to not comment on the caribou issue here. I guess  or stepping back, you know, I think in our operations budget, we still have a bit of a problem with departments in March madness and then with our Infrastructure budgets, we seem to have an obvious problem where we can't get money out the door and we see these quite a large carryovers. And I guess, I don't want to get too much into the details, but there's $70,000 for a patrol vehicle here. How do we not manage to buy a vehicle with any  and why does something like that have to go all the way back up to the...