Sandy Lee

But, Mr. Speaker, let me tell you, I have been through many, many briefings where the Deh Cho Bridge Corporation and the Community Alliance sees this as a great opportunity for them to partake in all the activities that are going on in North Slave area that they have not been able to take advantage of. They’re not near the diamond mines, they’re not near anywhere in the pipeline corridor, this is going to be a P3 partnership project where they will be able to get some profit out of this so that they can spend that money to invest in their communities. Anybody who questions about the value of...

Mr. Speaker…Mr. Speaker, let me conclude by saying, if I may, if I may conclude by saying…

That’s what governments do. Governments build schools, they build hospitals, they build roads. We don’t always ask what’s in it for us in terms of profit. These are public infrastructure and governments are supposed to do that.

Mr. Speaker, for anybody to say that we are sort of putting this in the front of the queue at the expense of another, has not done enough research. Mr. Speaker, people out there expect us to act on some of the things. This has been on the books for eight years. I will submit to you, Mr. Speaker, this is one of the rare projects that actually went through a...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. But the point is, businesses like this can never play on an even playing field. It doesn’t take into consideration the cost of doing business for the northern businesses here.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I feel like we had this discussion before when we were talking about constructing the jail where there are lots of benefits to having business being done in the North than just going for cost-efficiency. There is a lot of economies of scale that are going to be lost because there are so many more benefits having these businesses operate out of here that multinational corporations cannot provide. I am losing my question here. Mr. Speaker, Northstar’s position is the cost of operating is so high here that even with the business incentive…Okay, let me just ask a question...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask another set of questions to the Minister of Human Resources with regard to Northstar losing the EAP contract they have had for seven years. Mr. Speaker, there are such differences in facts about this case between the government and Northstar. Northstar says they were never advised about this inverse ratio calculation. The government says they were, that it was included in the RFP. The government says there was only one name that was added inadvertently, but Northstar states that there are at least three people they know of who were...

Mr. Speaker, there are lots of problems with this contract, but let me just focus on this name that was added. Mr. Speaker, just to put it simply, because it is quite complicated, this could be akin to McDonald’s bidding for a contract to supply Winter Games 2010 and they use a competitor as a subcontractor that they will replace wrongly in a real intentional fraudulent manner, I may add. Mr. Speaker, if the subcontractor is not important, then why did the contract ask for names of subcontractors? What was the reason for asking for that subcontractor’s name? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the outcome that we all expect is very clear. We would settle for nothing less than wage parity and fair and equitable benefits for these valuable employees. The only way to do this is for the government to put more funding to settle the package. Unless the government does this as soon as possible, we can expect a very long and hot summer. These employees can be expected to see all of us YK MLAs right by the workers. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

---Applause

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just a last follow-up and it has to do with the potential additional work being placed on child protection workers. While there's mention of a social worker who came to talk to us, we've had occasions to meet and talk to other government workers, some of them being child protection workers, during our public hearings. It was obvious to us that they're not fully aware of these amendments. In one way, I could understand that because the government workers would be advised of the change to process once it's in place and they may not be advised of it at the front end....

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just briefly, something that's not mentioned in this report as I'm presenting this is the fact that we do recognize the important and difficult work that the child protection workers do, and we do, just in case there is any sense out there from hearing our report that we are only pointing out perhaps the problem areas, it's probably due to the fact that our committee hearing process, in our process we are just reporting what we heard in our public hearing process. But I do understand that there are children in our communities that find themselves in a position where...