Julian Morse

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That's it for questions for me, and I'll just kind of reiterate that I'd like to see, you know, the department of MACA working to -- and Cabinet certainly working to stabilize this fund over time so that we're not stuck coming for supplementary estimates. And I think, you know, we need to figure out how to fund sport to ensure that, yeah, activity is going on in communities. I think a lot of the community programming is really important, and I just want to emphasize that. So I'll leave my comments at that for now. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And so I understand the need for a one-time contribution, but I guess I'd be interested to hear the Minister discuss whether there's been discussion about what can be done in the long term to stabilize this fund because I'm guessing we don't see it as a tenable situation to just simply be providing supplementary funding every single time we need to fund games. I mean, the idea was the lotteries revolving fund was supposed to sustain itself. It seems like we're not in that situation anymore, so I'm curious to hear what we're doing to resolve that problem. Thanks.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I have a few questions about the contribution to physical activities, sport and recreation fund. Just to be clear, what is this funding proposed to cover, the $1.8 million?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate following up after the Member from Monfwi because I couldn't have said it better myself. I really appreciated her comments, and certainly quite a lot was said about this motion already, and so I don't want to add too much to it; I appreciated the Minister's response.

Mr. Speaker, there's a few aspects of this motion that I'm more comfortable with than others but would say that much of this has been called for already by MLAs, the NWT Medical Association, nurses, and other healthcare practitioners, and this motion is kind of -- I don't even know...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I note that the report contains some short-term recommendations but also some very long-term recommendations as far as four years into the future. Mr. Speaker, how will the government ensure these recommendations are followed up on and not forgotten? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it's hard to see from my seat but you recognized them earlier, and I'm not sure if they're still there. But Frame Lake constituents, Jeremy Bird and Angela Gzowski were in this the House earlier. And I'd also like to recognize the Premier who I had the pleasure of working with in her capacity as education Minister and a Premier when I was working as a city councillor. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I just want to be very clear that, you know, I -- I'm not necessarily suggesting that that needs to be the case with this contract. It's more just ensuring that we've got robust controls around our contracting. Just knowing that, you know, we see costs overruns a lot. And it's important to note that, you know, a lot of the projects that the government does, virtually all of them, are for essential infrastructure, like this, like a school. Like, this is not something that MLAs are going to turn around and say, you know, we're just going to have to cancel this. Because...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, my questions are about the overage on the Mangilaluk School project in Tuktoyaktuk. I just -- it's quite a large overage, and just noting a lot of the concerns that were raised, you know, about the Stanton project and the auditor general report on that one, you know, spoke to our need to control the costs of contracts better, I guess and, you know, this is quite a large overage, so I'd just like to hear a description from the Minister as to how we got here and how we're continuing to improve our contracting and our budgeting and project planning to ensure that...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yeah, and certainly I just want to, you know, be clear in that my hope is that we are, you know, going to find ways to stabilize this fund because I think it's important that youth have opportunities not just to attend games but perhaps even more importantly just engage in activity and sports in their communities as much as possible. And I know that the funding from these -- the lottery revolving fund enables that and enables a lot of fantastic crucial programming in our communities, and so I want to see that continue.

Can the Minister enlighten the committee as to whether...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The next question is just the capacity building in NGOs. I know this is something the Premier has spoken about previously, and this is work that was planned. So for that reason, the fact that it was planned, I'm just curious why this came in as a supp; it wasn't simply budgeted for.