Tom Beaulieu

We are going to have some detail on that for the Member. I just want to give the deputy minister an opportunity to get some of the details here. We usually follow a process ourselves. Public Works is usually pretty up to date on their own warehousing needs and office needs, so I’m sure that if it’s a building that, as the Member indicates, is well over 20 years old, that we have it in the queue for possible replacement or a major retrofit, but we don’t have the details with us, unfortunately, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have had discussions internally on how the Sahtu region operates in as far as Public Works and Services goes. We would strongly look at placing an area manager into the region. We have other areas where the activity has not been as high as other bigger regions and we have placed area managers into these other areas. An example is Deh Cho. We’ve placed an area manager in Simpson who actually reports to the regional office from the South Slave; however, it becomes quite independent. This is what the Member wants to see, that the Sahtu region become more independent...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To my immediate right is Paul Guy, deputy minister of Public Works and Services. To my immediate left is Steve Lewis, director of corporate services; and to my far right, Laurie Gault, director of Technology Service Centre.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. No, that’s not what we’re saying. Safety is still an important part of our work. We are not going to abandon all of the safety programs or anything we have in place for safety. That’s not what we’re saying. What we are saying is, if we develop hard rules saying that individual contractors have to have certain types of specific safety certifications in order to be on our jobsites today, then we will have eliminated the majority of people that are doing contracting in the Northwest Territories today.

So what we are doing is we are working with industry to roll out this...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am pleased to present the 2015-2016 Main Estimates for the Department of Public Works and Services. Overall, the department’s estimates propose an increase of $5.1 million, or 4.4 percent, over the 2014-2015 Main Estimates. These estimates continue to support the objectives of limiting expenditure growth in order to sustain the long-term sustainability of the fiscal framework.

Highlights of the proposed estimates include:

an interdepartmental transfer of $6.1 million associated with the consolidation of the government’s energy functions, along with associated...

Yes, that is correct.

Counting both senior and regular management, we have about 80 Aboriginal women in management. The corporate nature of the GNWT, we have lots of women in management. Fifty percent of our deputy ministers are women.

What happens is when we become specific to how we’re going to fill positions, we always have affirmative action. The Affirmative Action Program looks at indigenous Aboriginal and also looks at women, who always have a priority. So, indigenous Aboriginal women would have the highest priority, and women also have a priority 1 or priority 2 category in this government. Using the...

Thank you, Madam Chair. We are beginning to move into a lot of safety areas as we continue to work with the Workers’ Safety Commission. We have contracts in place where when a contractor gets on a site, they would have to have a safety plan for the people on site. We don’t believe that WSCC is only there to collect premiums. Actually, we believe that people who are in construction are different than individuals who may be in retail and the requirement for having some safety plan in place on a construction site versus something that just may protect employees against some lighter duty injuries...

Each department in the GNWT is responsible for developing human resource plans. In each human resource plan there is succession planning. So, each of the plans actually identify positions in which they would complete a succession plan for successful individuals within their departments. It is also possible for using transfer assignments to move individuals from one department to another and put them into a succession plan which is intended to move individuals from lower levels into management positions and from management positions into senior management positions. Thank you.

The campaign has posters. We promote an inclusive workplace and we provide information to our employees. We have a GNWT Advisory Committee on Employability and the Employee and Family Assistance Program. We look at these. We try to promote as much as possible. We do encourage our managers to have discussions with individuals where we suspect that they are missing work due to mental illness and try to direct them in the right place so that they can receive some help. But there are a lot of privacy issues here as well. We have to be cognizant of privacy issues, so we work within that...