Caitlin Cleveland

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, through my conversations with the federal government, the federal minister did offer to the Northwest Territories an opportunity to potentially increase our allotment for the Northwest Territories nominee program, and the conversation there revolves around the Northwest Territories welcoming asylum seekers to the territory. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Member's absolutely right. There's great things happening in this territory right now, and the more that we can talk about them the more and more people will know about them and can take advantage of them.

One of the other things that's also occurring at the same time is some of our development corporations for Indigenous governments are taking on some fairly robust workforce development plans and executing them through on-the-job training and by pairing their goals with programs that are offered through education, culture and employment. For...

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. So, Mr. Chair, we have the vendor performance policy that was implemented. This is the first step through what the Member is referring to and having some teeth in that. That policy is held over in the Department of Finance, and we have been co-hosting online training sessions with staff to ensure that they understand it as well. And those training sessions, I should say, are both internal and external so it's not solely just for staff. It's also for business entities in the Northwest Territories. And this is a policy that we continue to implement in order to...

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. To my left, I have assistant deputy minister Melissa Cyr. And to my right, I have director of corporate services Nina Salvador.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would love to pass to assistant deputy minister Cyr.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. So, Mr. Speaker, in December I was presented by the president and the chairperson with an options paper so that I would know what they were looking at. That options paper had multiple different directions that the board might choose to go on it. Following that meeting, the Department of Education, Culture and Employment sat down with the board to let them know what each of the different options would mean as far as potential costs that would arise or how that would come out of their MOU so that they completely understood that it wasn't, you know, just a one...

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. And I love this question because I love the opportunity to talk about the fact that we have a diverse economy in the Northwest Territories and really what we're doing at this point is ensuring that we're supporting the diversity of our economy. And so we have programs that support agriculture, tourism. We have, you know, the -- sorry, the Member mentioned film. We have a film program that continues to grow because the multipliers for our film projects in the territory are incredible. It's got almost a 9 to 1 multiplier. And so investing there really is investing...

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. So we're certainly always making sure that we're getting the best bang for our buck. This was an RFP that was recently awarded, and so certainly still going through that process on a regular basis and so this contract was recently awarded and went through our procurement processes.

It's worth noting, too, that over the -- this is certainly not the norm. You know, our royalties over the last ten years have looked as wonderful as $62 million and then, unfortunately, this year it's far lower. I certainly hope that diamond commodities will turn around but that's not...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following two documents: Aurora College Annual Report 2023-2024 and College Corporate Plan 2024-2025. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The short answer, yes, this is something that is on top of their other duties for sure. But the other side of this is because we are currently the national chair for committee on internal trade, we are also able to pull on the CIT budget in order to -- we're not expected to fund these additional meetings, which I think is a positive for the territory.

The other piece of this is this was also the area where immigration used to sit within the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment, and that portion has now been pulled over to ECE, so it does narrow their focus somewhat. And I can say they...