Robert Hawkins

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I’m committed to finding innovative enforcement tools to make our communities and our neighbourhoods safer. We all know that crack houses unfairly can take a community area hostage by putting good citizens in jeopardy in horrible ways that I’ve talked about in my Member’s statement. I brought forward a copy of the Safe Communities and Neighbourhood Act to the Justice Minister and I will be tabling a copy later today. So my question to the Minister of Justice is, has he had a chance to look at the act and open up some type of dialogue between his...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t have to tell anyone in this House today about the rising problem we have in our communities with drugs. We have an annual $22 million drug habit in the Northwest Territories and it's projected to get worse as we grow. In this House, we talk about the drug problems; we talk about the help for the drug addicts; we talk about catching the criminals who traffic the drugs, but we rarely talk about the citizens in our communities who are living next door to these drug dealers.

The local newspaper reported last year that in a Yellowknife neighbourhood, residents had to...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. At the time of our public review of the 2004-2005 report, the Commissioner raised two additional issues which the committee wishes to comment on.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Commissioner recommends two amendments to the act to address problems that came to light in the course of a review of a decision to refuse access to information by the former Department of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development.

The first issue was with a specific provision of the act, paragraph 24(1)(f), which states that a public body must not disclose information that is a statement of financial assistance provided to a third party by a prescribed corporation or board. The Commissioner interpreted the words “prescribed corporation or board” to refer to...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Another of the Commissioner’s ongoing recommendations from past years is that the NWT enact its own “made-in-the-north” privacy legislation to regulate how the private sector collects, uses and discloses personal information. As an example of a concern with how the private sector handles personal information, she cited the continued practice of some NWT businesses of printing credit card numbers in their entirety on transaction slips. In southern Canada, it is now standard to print partial numbers only, which helps to prevent theft.

Although the NWT private sector is...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. A longstanding concern for the Commissioner has been the need for members and staff of boards and agencies to be aware of their obligations under the act and to implement appropriate records retention policies, particularly for documents in the hands of individual board members. The Commissioner recommends that, as a minimum, the chairs and executive directors of boards and agencies be required to take the training, although ideally training would be mandatory for all appointees.

The GNWT advised in its response to the 2003-2004 recommendations that ATIPP training is...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. Mr. Chairman, An underlying theme throughout the Commissioner’s report and presentation to the committee was the need to foster a corporate culture that is committed to open and transparent government and strives to follow the spirit as well as the letter of the act. The Commissioner points to a trend of public bodies automatically refusing access to information wherever they have a discretionary exemption under the act, without evaluating whether there are clear and compelling reasons to do so. She is concerned that public bodies, and in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to speak today on the exclusion of retroactive payments in income support programs and what I see as an oversight by these social assistance regulations. This issue is not the appeal process or the work done in the area by your dedicated civil servants, but rather a misstep in our policy.

Full confidence in the service being provided to the public requires diligence on the part of the government to see logical lapses corrected, and corrected immediately. With social assistance regulations, it states that retroactive income support payments are prohibited. A...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Recognizing the difficulty of getting a citizenship judge here in the Northwest Territories, I approached the concept of getting our honourable Commissioner to become one of the citizenship ceremony officials. I approached honourable Whitford and he liked the idea. I brought his name forward to the department and I see Minister Dent has written a letter in support to our federal Minister, Monte Solberg. Again, recognizing the problem that I’ve got and the information from the MP’s office, which is they will not be holding a citizenship ceremony, could I get the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I guess there are a couple of ways I can approach this. The first option is to let him know that he got an e-mail from his constituent that I was sent to, as well, so I'm surprised he wouldn't know about the regulations, referring to that e-mail and this problem about the lack of retro pay. So that being said, maybe I can, as an olive branch approach, maybe we can take the Minister up on his offer. I'll bring the matter to his office if he's willing today to look into it further and deal with this problem. That will be all. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.