Tom Beaulieu

Yes, Madam Chair, I would.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. The morale of the GNWT workforce is very important to the Government of the Northwest Territories. We do surveys with the staff and usually there is quite a tremendous uptake. I know that the Department of Health did their own survey with the authorities in the past. We do surveys with GNWT staff and ask those questions about whether individuals consider their jobs to be rewarding, if they’re satisfied with their supervisor, if they’re happy with the way things are at work. If there are any areas where they have concerns, those are the types of things we try to capture...

Again, as I indicated, we would be pleased to look at both the ATIPP Act and the Public Service Act to see if it would be a legislative proposal which would be shared with all committee members. If this House felt that it would be in the best interest of the public to disclose salaries of individuals, then we will move in that direction. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Legislative authority would have to be changed. The step would be to amend the ATIPP Act and the Public Service Act. Thank you.

Thank you. Generally the winter roads operate in a certain time period. We track the average times in which the roads remain open. As far as the operations costs of the road, these are all done by contract. So we sign the contract with a company to do a certain part of the winter road and we stay with that contract, and that contract is intended to provide services from the time the road opens until the road closes. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. For communication purposes, we’ve communicated, when we saw that the weather was warming up a bit, a possibility of reducing heavy traffic to night traffic, but at this time there are no restrictions. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. No, I don’t. Thank you.

Sometimes, I think, there has been some joint participation between the department and the Students Against Drunk Driving in combatting impaired driving such as check stops and so on. To date, I don’t believe there have been joint efforts with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but the department would be willing to entertain any joint initiatives that Mothers Against Drunk Driving would like to propose to the department. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, on the management costs on highways and also safety regulations, Member Bromley was asking the reason why those two costs went down over the years. I’m just going to have the deputy minister do a response on those two areas.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Transportation works with organizations like the Students Against Drunk Driving and Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We offer some financial support to the Students Against Drunk Driving and we’ve developed a High Risk Drivers Program that we do in consultation with these citizen-based organizations. We consider these organizations to be very important and attribute a lot of the downturn in impaired driving and injuries related to impaired driving to organizations such as MADD and SADD. Thank you.