Robert Hawkins

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Minister has provided me with a briefing note. The Minister has provided me with some stats. The Minister has provided me with some further information, and oddly enough, all these three pieces of information conflict with each other. I’ve talked to the people in the community of Paulatuk and their information conflicts with all three pieces even further.

I’d like to ask the Minister of the Housing Corporation who is doing these particular assessments on these units, what is their qualification, what are their competencies and when were the assessments of these...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As you know, housing conditions in remote communities matter to all Members of this House regardless of what constituency you represent. I want to talk about some of the public housing conditions in Paulatuk here today.

I’ve been reading some of the condition ratings provided in detail by the Housing Corporation, and I am quite concerned, and I think we need to discuss them today. Now, if you have visited or perhaps been in contact with any of the families there recently, you would hear one point of view, and of course, if you have asked for information such as I have...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think this whole issue really boils down to something very simple as saying this: We don’t want to cause any further strain to this family’s economic situation, and furthermore, we don’t want to provide any extensive financial hardships to the person who has volunteered or, in some cases, doesn’t really have a choice. They have to go as the medical escort. If you weigh and balance the great strain being a medical escort can cause – and I’m talking about the pocketbook or the financial hardship that can be created by this situation – it causes one to say, well, we don...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’re getting somewhere on this file and I want to be very clear. Will the Minister send proper professionals with appropriate credentials to go and assess those particular units, not send some secretary in there to walk out or some administrative assistant to walk in there, count heads, count bodies, whatever the case may be to say is your unit well. I want competent professionals that can go in there, assess them properly, develop a plan with the community and show them that the housing issues matter to them. Because right now I’m getting calls that there’s an oil...

Mr. Speaker, I’m going to have questions for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment regarding some of this Junior Kindergarten stuff, just to follow up with some of the problems that we’ve talked about to date and certainly issues I’ve raised before.

I was speaking to two parents yesterday with grave concerns about this, because they had gone to an invitation at, I believe, our museum to talk about the impacts on day home operators, and the senior official said that, yes, you might lose a third of your income, but if you were better budgeters you would notice very little change.

Is...

Mr. Speaker, I would like to know what the Department of Transportation is going to do when it comes to finding out if we have any holdbacks on this particular work at this time and what are we going to do when we need to address these in the future. Quite frankly, a northern company that has investments here, that has employees hired here that wanted to do this particular work lost the job because the southern business lowballed them and it seems like we are going back to fix the work that they lowballed a northern company.

Are we at a financial risk or a legal risk in this situation because...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I just want to pick up a little bit on one of the subjects Member Dolynny raised with the Deh Cho Bridge. Of course, I’ll be directing them, obviously, to the Minister of Transportation.

More than a year ago, I was raising with the former Minister of Transportation a concern about the electrical contractor, how he was quite proud about the fact that the southern contractor met the expectations of the contract, and of course, we had to award it to the southern contractor because they were cheaper. Of course, they met the standards of everything that they had asked for in...

Thank you. So, go to the website; interesting answer. As I brought up before, the website says send all correspondence through the president’s office. So the president gets to handle, control who knows what with the information. So the direct contact and accountability, what is the Minister afraid of to tell them to provide them with an Aurora College e-mail address because if they’re on the Board of Governors, they’re there as an advisory board, they’re there as an administrative board, or are they there for whatever reason? I don’t know. Maybe the Minister will take that initiative on and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. On February 5, 2014, I’d asked the Minister of Education to use some of his authority under Section 7 of the Aurora College Act. I asked him to tell the Aurora College Board of Governors to meet the students and certainly provide some e-mail addresses so people can contact them, but rather, they still appear to be anonymous. Perhaps they like it that way in a sense of governance of the board and the college for the students.

I want to hear what updates the Minister can provide the House immediately to find out has he actually done anything. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, I asked this question well over three months ago and I’m still waiting for an answer. I’ve asked it in committee. The Minister said that they would get back to me. If it’s my error that I’ve received your response, which I’m pretty sure I haven’t, please resend.

The fact is my understanding is that no one has responded to me after three months on this issue. I, frankly, want us to find ways to ensure that we attract well-educated people back to the Northwest Territories. I think it’s of great value that we have people from the Northwest Territories who have spent most of their...