Wendy Bisaro

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We wish to deal with Committee Report 14-17(5), Standing Committee on Government Operations Report on the 2014 Review of the Official Languages Act. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have some questions today for the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs. I want to thank the Minister at the outset for the response to my oral question which he tabled yesterday, read into Hansard yesterday.

It doesn’t go all the way to answering some of the questions that I wanted to ask him last month, so I want to ask a few more.

One of the recommendations from the Information and Privacy Commissioner, in regards to access to information and protection of privacy legislation for municipalities, was that the government ought to consider a phased-in approach to...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I move that we report progress.

--Carried

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I move that this committee recommends that the Department of Education, Culture and Employment work closely with the Standing Committee on Government Operations to revise and bring forward its legislative proposal for amendments to the Official Languages Act in the life of this Assembly;

And further, if the department has received any legal opinions related to the issue of federal concurrence with changes to the NWT’s Official Languages Act, this information should be shared in confidence with the Standing Committee on Government Operations, so that the department and the...

Thanks to the Minister for considering that. That’s great. I appreciate that commitment.

One of the things in the fall MACA update, there was a little blurb on municipal access to information and protection of privacy legislation, and that was my initial reason for asking some questions. It states in the MACA fall update that it is expected that this report will be completed during the life of the 17th Assembly. In the response yesterday, the Minister said that they’re working on it, they’re talking to senior staff at communities, but I didn’t really get a sense of when the report is going to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. About two months ago I had the opportunity to attend a sport forum sponsored by the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs. It was a gathering of representatives of recreation and sport organization partners from across the NWT with the MACA Minister and staff. It was billed as a meeting to seek input from the sport and recreation sector, input being sought to advise both the 18th Assembly and MACA on priorities and plans for the future of sport and recreation in the NWT.

There were representatives from each of the hardworking territorial organizations that manage...

I would ask the Minister to look into this a little further. I think he ought to check with managers of every department and find out. There are, from what I understand, a number of people who work from home and their home is not in the NWT.

I’d like to ask the Minister, if he says that he’s looking into this and he thinks people should be working here, if we do have employees who live outside the NWT, I find it very hard to understand how that fits in with our policy of 2,000 people in the NWT in the next five years. How does it fit in that we allow this to happen?

I couldn’t quite hear the Minister at the end but I thought he said that he was going to encompass in the HR Manual all the policies, all the various policies that we have, the one for voluntary separation, the one for affected employees. I can’t remember the names, but there are two or three other ones.

Is that what the Minister said, that he is going to encompass all policies in the HR Manual, and if that’s the case, when will that be done?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I want to speak about how we, the GNWT, treat some of our employees. I think we generally do a good job, but certainly I and all Members, I expect, have had constituents who have not been treated well by government.

To explain, here’s an example. I use the government’s actions with staff whose job it is to be decentralized. There are two issues here. One is how we advise our employees about the decentralization of their job. It’s done respectfully, but well before the job will actually change location. Staff are notified more than a year in advance of the...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I move that we report progress.