Tom Beaulieu

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. On the deferred maintenance, yes, when an asset is sold and no longer is usable, it’s beyond economical repair, then we replace it. At the point we replace it our deferred maintenance does drop, but we would immediately start to accumulate deferred maintenance on a new building. So, slowly, if we’re able to renew our buildings for the most part, then we would continue to chip away at the deferred maintenance but we could never get the deferred maintenance right down to nothing, as an example. As soon as a building is new and is introduced as an asset for the Government...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To my left is the deputy minister of Public Works and Services, Paul Guy; and to my right, director of TSC, Laurie Gault.

That’s exactly what we intend to do. We have various categories, like I indicated, positions that require university degrees as an example, and positions that require trades, a position that requires college, as an example. We are developing plans in Human Resources to start looking at the various job categories, so we’d look at the job categories and determine how we can best fill those job categories.

I’m having a lot of discussions with the deputy of HR and we in turn are trying to put a plan together, are putting a plan together, not trying, and then I intend to discuss each of these plans...

Mr. Speaker, this was a job fair that occurred in Ottawa that was a bit controversial the last time we were in the Assembly. I got the information and looked at it, and the one thing I don’t have but could present to the Member no problem, or to the House, would be the cost of that. That’s not an issue. We can determine the cost of that fairly simply.

What I am saying is that we were able to get the five positions. Exactly where those five individuals came to work, I don’t know. My guess is, a 50 percent guess would be that they probably ended up in Yellowknife because the vacancy rate in the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think that we will try to provide some detail. We have done a lot of work in energy efficiency on the midlife retrofits. Each time we’ve done that we’ve tried to be as energy efficient as possible, and biomass. We have a Capital Asset Retrofit Fund which is just savings from the operation of the buildings that we’re doing, so eventually as we do more buildings, we’re getting more savings, so that budget just continues to grow as we continue to do more buildings, and we’re saving a lot of money in fuel and we’re reducing greenhouse gases substantially from the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do.

Probably the two biggest lessons learned were that we need to cut the ice sooner to get the ferry in before the ice hardens too much. That was a big lesson. The second lesson learned is we need to accelerate the construction of the ice road. Last year we were accelerating the construction of the ice road, but we need to add to that and accelerate the ice road even further.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d have to answer that question in two parts. First, with light vehicles, historically traffic for light vehicles was essentially shut down for almost a full month. That’s the historical data. Last year they were shut down for 19 days. Then vehicles up to 60,000, which is a threshold, I think, where the majority of the supplies can get across the Mackenzie River, historically in the last several years the shutdown has been anywhere from 72 to 83 days. Last year the shutdown was 33 days.

The last time the federal government did spend money on the port was in 2012-13. We recognize that there appears to be an abandonment of that responsibility at this point. In order for me to include that item under the Department of Transportation business plan, again, I would have to go through the process here, the business planning process, and come to the Members to request that money be put into our business plan in order to dredge the port in Hay River.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Hay River dredging was not on the agenda because it was the meeting of the Ministers of Transportation and I didn’t have an opportunity to speak with her. But in any event, we should be talking to the Minister responsible for Fisheries and Oceans or the Minister responsible for Supply and Services, which is the Minister responsible for the Coast Guard. Thank you.