Wendy Bisaro

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have some concerns about this money that’s associated with the Devolution Final Agreement as well. I believe we brought this up before, but I think there’s a concern on the part of Members that, you know, the money is there and we are being assured that it’s going to be used for devolution purposes, whether it’s to refit an office or whether it’s to hire a person that we didn’t anticipate that we needed to have hired before. But I think there’s also some nervousness about the fact that this money is sitting in general revenues. We get assurance that it’s only going to...

Mr. Chair, I move that we report progress.

---Carried

Thank you, Madam Chair. I move that internal compliance audits and action plans designed to address deficiencies prepared by regional authorities be forwarded to the Standing Committee on Social Programs.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I also have a process question here and I don’t believe we discussed it. It may have come to my mind after we went through the bill at committee, but if an amount in here, for instance, an amount that is to be forgiven, if it is not written off first, if it goes straight to forgiveness of debt and it’s now written off, how then is it accounted for in the public accounts? The comptroller general referenced that write-offs are part of the doubtful accounts in the books, but if it goes straight to forgiveness of debt, how is it accounted for? Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have two motions to go and then we’ll move on to Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have some questions. I don’t really have comments, but in going over the bill at committee, there were a number of things that I wondered about. Maybe I can just, sort of, wonder those out loud and then the Minister can respond.

We haven’t seen a bill like this every year and I wondered if I could get a sense of the trend over the last, say, 10 years or even five years of how much we are writing off annually. Is it an amount that’s going up or going down?

I also wondered about the policies and the guidelines that we use to write off debts. I know these are, as they...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to, first of all, as did Mr. Moses, recognize the actions of Mr. Leef to bring his private member’s bill to the Parliament of Canada. It’s a bill that will assist Northerners right across the whole of the North.

I’d like to thank my colleagues who have spoken in favour of the bill and I’d like to thank the seconder of the motion, Mr. Moses, for doing that job for me. I’m pleased to hear that there’s recognition of the need to address the problem of FASD by Members and by Cabinet alike. I really appreciate that.

Thanks, Mr. Chair, and thanks to the Minister and staff for that. So this was only a portion of the operation of the lab. So the private sector was offset totally by revenue, if I heard that. So then we have a corresponding… I think it’s 50 percent of the costs of the lab that we are paying for, or is there revenue to offset our portion of costs as well? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. WHEREAS Bill C-583, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder), is before the House of Commons;

AND WHEREAS Bill C-583 seeks to define fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) in the Criminal Code and to allow the courts to order assessments and consider mitigating circumstances where FASD contributes to the offence;

AND WHEREAS fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is an incurable developmental disability resulting from exposure to alcohol before birth;

AND WHEREAS 43 percent of the NWT population regularly consumes five or more drinks per occasion...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I seem to have been labeled as anti-iPad and anti-corporate sponsorship. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe because I expressed a concern with the fact that we don’t have a policy to deal with corporate sponsorships.

I am not against corporate sponsorship. I think I need to impress upon people that I am making a distinction between corporate money going to government and corporate money going to a sporting event, for instance.

We are – and I use us all in this room – we are the government. By putting a name on a piece of equipment, we are endorsing that organization, that...