Robert Hawkins

These are the warning signs of suicide sometimes: showing deep depression, ongoing sadness, showing interest in dying, engaging in dangerous activities and saying things like they can’t handle things anymore. If you know anyone with these signs, get them help, because suicide never makes things better. Schools can prevent bullying, like encouraging students to stand up for them when bullied. Other ways that students can prevent bullying is having school-wide events to prevent bullying.

Now is the time to prevent bullying because it is now clearly becoming an illegal offence. So I encourage...

Mr. Chair, I appreciate Mr. Koe’s answer on that. I will frame this question on two points. What type of public dialogue do you draw out there? I don’t see any ads in this particular area saying, are liquor laws meeting our needs? Really, I think they are individual ones. Recently we changed concerns in the Sahtu to reflect what is needed and demanded there. Rightly or wrongly, it seemed like the right thing to do and certainly the right thing to support, as far as I was concerned, because we were responding to community area needs, certainly people’s needs.

What type of outreach does this area...

Mr. Chair, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I do want to say that I highly value the Bureau of Statistics. I find that the information they produce is very good. I don’t find it is a consumable maybe the general public grabs upon. It’s usually for those folks like academics and whatnot and those researchers and boring MLAs that are trying to find a crowbar to complain about government. With that said, I’m very grateful.

I just want to put on the stats that that is a shop burrowed into the hollows of government. It does some good work. I just want to thank them for the...

By the way, that mine promotion statement was brought to you by the Minister of ITI that everything’s fine.

The question for the public here is – now on to the next issue – building capacity. One agreement had highlighted 38 percent of material, equipment and purchasing through the construction phase would be done locally in the Northwest Territories. Furthermore, when they went on to operations, the goods and services at 32 percent would be purchased in the Northwest Territories.

The question to the Minister of ITI is: How does the public know that they’re living up to their agreement in a...

Mr. Speaker, I’ve stood up in this House a few times to express my concerns about the mines not meeting their socio-economic targets, especially in the area of jobs. But rather than wasting today’s time and certainly the public’s time, I’m hearing Minister Ramsay defend why they continue to have failures in certain areas. Let’s build upon what we know and let’s turn it into a success.

Everybody in the Assembly here knows that mines perform a regular performance reporting and they write out and explain where they have met their key targets and components on the socio-economic agreements and...

Mr. Chairman, I certainly support this. I’ve been raising this particular matter for a lot of years, and I’m kind of glad to see it finally get a bit of traction on this side of the House. For many years I had heard at the time Finance Minister Roland say, oh no, don’t worry. That’s why we’ll have a Heritage Fund, and don’t worry; we’ll use the Heritage Fund to take care of any ups and downs. Then along came, following him, Finance Minister Miltenberger, the eldered Miltenberger, that is, and in his wise way he, too, said much the same way, don’t worry, there will be a Heritage Fund one day...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I understand that potentially some Members may be having concerns with the grants and contributions and certainly the overall program with this particular page, so what I ask is rather than being sort of bent up in the sense of doing something we are not quite sure what we want to do at this particular time, is it possible that the Minister could commit to a discussion and certainly a briefing regarding things like the grants and contributions on this division. Maybe we could have an overall look at it before the end of this budget cycle and the commitment that we will...

The Minister seems to be missing the opportunity. Here is the chance for us to publicize things like our business building capacity section as highlighted in the socio-economic agreements, our cultural and community well-being results. Why doesn’t the Minister seize the opportunity and start publicizing these annually in a newspaper to show the everyday citizen who wants to know are Northerners being employed, are they meeting up to these agreements, and what is the government if they’re not. Will he consider that and do that?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There is a clear expectation, and I certainly will say a right and correct expectation of the public that the Government of the Northwest Territories is monitoring, managing and certainly enforcing the socio-economic agreements. But frankly, the everyday person doesn’t know where to find these things, and thank goodness we have the research to help us track these down.

By way of example, I’ll say De Beers, in a 2012 report – by the way, it was a 40-page report – said that they were almost meeting their targets of 300 NWT residents working for them. They were at 275. That...

Mr. Chairman, after hearing that, it inspired me. I move that we report progress.

---Carried