Tom Beaulieu

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Where it is possible to hang art in our new buildings, we will do that. We have been working with the NWT Arts Society. You are seeing some of the screens with the art on them at the airport here and in the main office building in Inuvik. So we’ll continue working with them to put what’s appropriate up in that new building.

That was a major complaint, as the Member indicates, when we were in Fort Liard. We are going to also be doing some dust suppression in the areas where they were considered to have the greatest amount of issues with dust on Highway No. 7.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The intention is as soon as possible to get the construction started again on that road. My understanding is that section was already awarded last year and it was not completed. It will be completed this year in addition to the other work that we are planning on under the Building Canada Plan. Thank you.

We can do that survey of people to find out if what we are offering is something they would be interested in. That would be the various things like working flexible hours, job sharing and so on. We do employee satisfaction surveys across our government, so it is something that we could perhaps add to the survey. The next survey that is coming up, perhaps we could ask those key questions about whether the employees think that accommodating them with this option is something that they would be interested in and get a feel for how many employees might want to job share or take a differed leave...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We do have a job share policy in the government. Currently, the boards and agencies and the departments are allowed to hire and put two persons into one position and they share the one job. That is currently allowed in our system. Thank you.

We will do everything we can to try to keep the traffic flowing on the highway, so if there is a list… It becomes a difficulty to try to anticipate when the road will be shut down. Last year we found that to be difficult to anticipate. But if there are fires near the highway, communications and Environment and Natural Resources will stay in touch with them. If we’re able to determine that we might have to shut the road down two days out, four days out, whatever, I will be prepared to accept a list from the Member and provide that to the departments, and the departments can touch base with...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department has been advised that we had done an excellent job in communicating with the folks last year during the fire season. We’re going to continue and, in fact, maybe enhance some of the areas that we had communicated to the people and to industry from last year. We have Twitter. We have a website. We also have a toll-free website and also the toll-free telephone, so we’re able to communicate with people, and people are able to communicate with us.

On contacting the actual people like the grocery stores or the hospitals and so on, we’re afraid that if we reach...

I will have the department provide that information to the committee.

Those are real good ideas that I’m going to have a discussion with the deputy minister of Human Resources on.

One thing that was contemplated this year, it was interesting, it was brought up by another Member last year, and that was hiring students on a 0.7, 0.8 basis so that they have an opportunity to also work outside of their field of studies and maybe go into the private sector a bit and then give the private sector an opportunity to also attract the students. That was something that we looked at so that we would broaden out. If we were to hire all the students at 0.75 as opposed to the...

Of the 230 who are signed on, 120 of those students are priority 1 candidates and 106 of those students are priority 2 candidates and four students hired to date have no priority status. Thank you.