Sandy Lee

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to recognize some of the people associated with the United Nations Association of Canada: project officers, Saad Omar Khan and Mara Brotman, both from Toronto.

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I think, actually, Saad might be from Ottawa. Sorry. Jeff MacKie, who is a national board of director for the NWT of the United Nations Association of Canada. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

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Thank you, Mr. Speaker. May I seek unanimous consent to finish my paragraph? Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We, as a committee, have filed a very extensive report on this bill in the House a couple of days back. It is as a result of a quite extensive public hearing process. We appreciate the Minister bringing forward a number of amendments that he feels would address some of the issues that were raised in the report. However, Madam Chair, I need to state, as committee chair and as a member, that there were a number of issues that were raised in the report that would not be, in our opinion, able to be addressed by way of amendments. So, for that reason, and specific to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I would like to just take a few minutes to give my thanks to many people who make it possible for me to be here today. First of all, I would like to thank my constituents for giving me their trust to serve them as their MLA for the last eight years. It is an honour like no other. I don’t think there is any other…I don’t even think you can call this a job. It is something that is possibly a democratic system that we have where on election day, the people across the NWT go out and put an X next to the names of people that are here. It is a complete...

I realize that we may be…I guess the lawyers here might want to err on the side of caution and we don't want to be too definitive in interpreting this clause. But I think Mr. Wright has basically said what I was looking for, but I'm just going to confirm this again in my remaining seconds. Am I right in thinking that if, say, this clause requires the workplace to be a dominant clause, dominant factor of the injury or the disease, your burden of proof would have been lot higher than what we have here, which is a little lower but higher than trivial cause? I could look in that step-by-step...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do appreciate that we have to go against sort of the established machinery of that case law interpretation, but in his legal opinion, would section 1.1 make any difference whatsoever in interpreting that clause that’s interpreted that way everywhere over time? Can we do anything differently here? Are we doing anything differently because of that? Thank you.

Okay. For the record, I'd like to say that these changes were supported by not only the PSAC, UNW and NWT Federation of Labour, but also the NWT Construction Association, and that was, I think, mentioned in the report. Let me just say this again. From what I understand, if someone gets injured in a workplace, if they could prove that that happened in the workplace, doesn't have to prove but there's enough through medical opinion or whatever that the work had something to do with it. That doesn't have to be dominantly work, but if work had something to do with it, then you will be...

Could I get the Minister to commit that section 92 will be read in context of section 1.1? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, this is a clause on causation, which obviously is one of the crucial components in this new legislation. As was indicated in the committee report, there have been amendments to this legislation to make the standard of proving cause as being something that’s dominant in the workplace. I’m wondering, regarding dominant causes of workplace injury, and I’m wondering if, for the interest of those who are listening to this, the Minister or his staff could explain how this would be implemented in the real cases? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a question on clause 92 which deals with the presumption in favour of injured workers and this is a very important and often controversial component of the workers’ compensation legislative system. I know the workers who go through the claim process, some of them feel that they’re not always treated with the presumption in favour of them as injured workers, and probably the workers in the system don’t agree. Anyway, I would like to ask the Minister how this section will be different than what was in place prior to this legislation in a specific term. I don’t...