R.J. Simpson

Thank you, Madam Chair. So as I understand it, the costs aren't laid out in the capital estimates. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have Charlene Doolittle, the deputy minister for the Department of Justice, and James Bancroft, the director of corporate services.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to present to the House Bill 57, Miscellaneous Statute Law Amendment Act 2022, to be read for the first time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you. I don't I'm not sure who the owner of that building is, thank you. But we can find out and get that information to the Member. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. You know, I'll just hand it to Mr. Bancroft. He has the details on this one.

Yes, please.

Thank you, Madam Chair. To the amendment, I do think the amendment does improve on the previous recommendation. Once again, the previous recommendation or the main motion is very prescriptive. It's the Assembly encroaching on how Members run their offices. It's saying you will share an office in a central location. We've already seen a bit of that encroachment occur today, and so I'm happy that actually the Member reversed course and went a different direction on this one because I think it is an improvement.

I do have an office downtown in Hay River, a constituency office. I made sure that I...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I don't have that. When a client goes to apply for income assistance, we don't ask what their level of education is. And, you know, I think as a government we need to always be mindful of how much information we are requesting. However, I get the Member's point; it would be useful information. I think that we're at a point, though, where we have a good sense of what the education system is like across the territory in communities. We have a lot of data out there, and we just need to start implementing or continue to implement some of these new initiatives to help...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So the first reading by the Senate was on October 6th. So I don't think that those benefits have been finalized yet. I understand that the federal government should have them finalized and money should be flowing perhaps by the end of this month.

When that happens, I can say that we will be exempting the additional GST that clients may be receiving. So currently GST rebates are counted as income against someone's income assistance. But understanding that the reason this is being doubled is because of the record inflation that we're facing, we are not going to count that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So there's a number of ways. First I'll speak about ways outside of the income assistance program. We have the small Community employment funds. $4 million go into communities every year to help create jobs which helps people, you know, get jobs and earn income. We have labour we have funds for employers to hire people who might need additional training, people who the employers might not otherwise hire. And we have a number of different programs like that. I recommend that everyone read the recent report from the Ombud on income assistance. They talk quite a bit about...