Rylund Johnson

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Thebacha, that the Committee Report 3819(2), the Standing Committee on Government Operations report on the review of Bill 62, An Act to Amend the Income Tax Act, be received and adopted by the Assembly. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Thebacha, that Committee Report 3819(2), the Standing Committee on Government Operations report on the review of Bill 62, An Act to Amend the Income Tax Act, be received and adopted by the Assembly. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It's quite clear that the scope of practice of our pharmacists is falling well behind the rest of Canada. And whether that be for emergency prescriptions, prescriptions for minor ailments, adapting in managing prescriptions, ordering lab tests, there is all sorts of things that pharmacists can do in the rest of Canada that they can't do here. So my question for the Minister of health is will we expand the scope of practice for our pharmacists? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Madam Speaker, I wish to table the following document: Redacted Reports for the Department of Health and Social Services from the Internal Audit Bureau obtained under Access to Information. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Speaker. The other document which I would like to see, which I'm actually not sure exists I know we have a fiveyear needs assessment showing what we need. But whether we have a multiyear capital plan? I note I can go to the infrastructure acquisition plan and it shows we are currently planning to spend $1.4 billion in the future years. But there's certainly nothing that shows what we've already spent, the listing projects, whether things are on time, whether things are completed, if something gets completed well, we don't ever actually know that and we certainly never...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Presently through the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs, we require every single municipality to have an asset management plan. This essentially lists every single asset and piece of infrastructure they own, its operation and maintenance, and then a life cycle replacement cost. And obviously we would require this to be public because we don't let municipalities do things incamera. But the GNWT, as far as I know, doesn't have any asset management plan. The closest thing we have is a 20year capital needs assessment which lists the assets we own and what we...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Our government's open government policy commits to our public service being open by design to build a government that is open by default. And Madam Speaker, it is my experience that the exact opposite is true that, in fact, we are closed by design and closed by default. And this is shown, Madam Speaker, in the repeated requests that myself and committees have made for information that is inevitably either marked confidential or not provided at all. Every year when the capital budget comes forward, I give the same speech about wanting to see the same documents made...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. When the capital budget was first introduced, I had a number of requests that would require my vote, and they were the same requests I've made for repeated years. They're largely ones of information, Madam Speaker. I do appreciate the Minister's new approach to passing more realistic capital budgets. I was informed today we may or may not have an asset management plan; it's certainly something I've never seen. But I'd like to go through what I would expect to be in a capital budget, and it would largely be an asset management plan.

The first question would be, what do...

Yeah, thank you, Madam Speaker. I would just like to rise in support of this motion. I you know, absent legislation being passed in the remaining time in this Assembly, it looks like we're heading into an election with the same boundaries, which I think we all know have some discrepancies in population. And, you know, I don't think it's right for us to wait another eight years to then adjust those again. So by moving this up an Assembly, adding some more members and some better representation, hopefully the next Assembly can have a report and pass one of the recommendations in there.

I also...

Yeah, thank you, Madam Speaker. Yeah, and I'd be very interested to know whether Infrastructure is going to include the projects that don't fall under it. You know, I know we're building quite a number of longterm care facilities under Health and Social Services that not under Infrastructure, as an example.

And lastly, in our capital plan, we get one sentence description of projects, and then what happens is Members kind of ask, you know, what's going on with this playground fencing? Or we just ask these tedious questions that takes us hours and hours of review to get any information out there...