Caroline Wawzonek

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following document: Annual Report 20222023 Office of the Regulator of Oil and Gas Operations. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there's a lot there and our submission to CRTC was around 70 pages or so. So let me try to sum up. The statistics of the 63 versus 94 comes from the Northern Canada Internet Use Survey, NCIUS, and that's done by Statistics Canada. This one was from 2021. And, Mr. Speaker, the I would say the public hearings were productive. One very discrete and specific outcome was we saw that NorthwesTel, in fact, agreed with the proposal that we've been advocating for, both at the federal government and publicly, around the Connecting Families 2.0 Initiative.

This is an...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I do meet with NorthwesTel periodically and they and frequently well, and the purpose of those meetings is to get an update on achieving 50/10. That is their mandate through CRTC that they are to be providing the availability of 50/10, even if not with the affordability that I also continue to advocate where availability doesn't do much if we can't afford it.

Mr. Speaker, I have on those occasions asked them and encouraged them to also reach out to standing committees to make their presentations available. I will certainly follow up to ensure that they are reaching out...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, leasing does fall a little bit out of the wheelhouse for me in the Department of Finance but certainly in terms of understanding what's happening as a wholeofgovernment, infrastructure and the Department of the Executive do confirm that they do want to look together at the improved real property policy. They do want to do that once the formal procurement processes for government procurement and public procurement are done, but also in line with the Indigenous procurement policy that I had just described a few moments ago. So that work will be underway once...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I certainly feel for any residents right now that are, you know, anywhere in the South Slave dealing with some variety of natural disasters or any other personal circumstances. I'm not going to be in a position to speak to what whether or not NorthwesTel and Bell need to sort out their billing in a different way. I can certainly raise it to the counterparts at NorthwesTel that I do meet with on occasion and see if there is a path forward or, you know, perhaps try to support provide us some information about online banking opportunities. And if that's in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we don't need to do things the way the Yukon or the federal government do. I know the Yukon process wasn't necessarily greeted with a hundred percent pleasantness from the Indigenous governments in the Northwest Territories or in the Yukon nor from their businesses.

Where we are on this one, Mr. Speaker, an Indigenous procurement policy has gone to the Northwest Territories Council of Leaders and our modern treaty and selfgovernment tables. This is where it belongs. These are the groups that are going to be impacted. These are groups that need to have a...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I can't make everybody whole. The Government of the Northwest Territories can't make everybody whole. I think more several of my colleagues have already spoken about how heartbreaking this is, to hear on late Sunday night that this community was being evacuated yet again. Mr. Speaker, my first thoughts were to children who were being woken up in the middle of the night to have to leave their houses again. So, you know, it's not for lack of awareness of how tremendously difficult this must be to the extent that someone who is not experiencing it can even...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, emergency leave is available to public servants during an evacuation. This is paid leave. It does not draw down from other leave banks. And if an employee is being asked to take some other form of leave, Mr. Speaker, they should be discussing that with their supervisor or raising it in appropriate ways. If necessary, it come through MLA, it can come to me, but they should be on emergency leave with pay. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I guess I don't know what the lines are of communication that look to have been breached but, Mr. Speaker, the job of officials in ITI is to be in direct contact with fishers all around the lake. And I would expect them to continue to be in contact with fishers all around the lake. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Fish Revitalization Strategy from back in 2017 speaks to these exact challenges. Unfortunately, rather than seeing production go up from the time of 2017, production has only continued to go down. We are nowhere near hitting our quota on the lake, and it certainly is going to impact the fish plant. There's no secrets to that, Mr. Speaker. So, Mr. Speaker, we need to work with the fishers. We want to ensure that they know that we're working actively to make sure that we are not going to remain under FFMC forever. There's different pathways to get there...