Thank you, Mr. Roland. I have a long list of people who want to speak. Do you have anything else, Mr. Villeneuve? Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Maybe to expedite the discussion on this issue, I would like to move a motion right now. We can discuss the motion. I am sorry if I am giving the government a little bit of motion sickness tonight...

---Laughter

...but I am trying to prove a point, Madam Chair.

I move that $460,000 be deleted from the Department of Education, Culture and Employment, income security activity, in Supplementary Appropriation, No. 2, 2005-2006.

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. The motion is in order. To the motion. The motion is being circulated. I will just give a moment here for everybody to get a copy of it. To the motion. Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I thank my colleagues for tagging along on some of the motions. I can appreciate that there are stands on various ones; I hope to get their support on this one. Again, I think it is important that we do send a message to the government. I think this is the most substantive issue in this supplementary that we can do just that. I don't think all the homework was done on this transfer of $30 million from the Housing Corporation over to ECE without any positions with it. I think it was poorly managed, to be honest with you, Madam Chair. As I said, we have to put our foot down at some point in time. This is as good a time as any.

I mentioned this before, and I will mention it again. It says $460,000 in the supplementary, $183,000 for a one-time start-up and implementation cost, and $277,000 for the salaries and benefits. That is just from January to March of next year, Madam Chair. What these new positions will mean is about $1.2 to $1.3 million on an ongoing basis. I think it is incumbent upon the government to come back with a better plan. I know they can come up with a better plan. Why aren't positions accompanying the $30 million

from the Housing Corporation? That would be the logical thing to look at.

Madam Chair, I do hope I have the support of my colleagues on this side of the House to send a clear, and direct, message to the government, that they have to do more with what they have. They haven't demonstrated that to us yet. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. To the motion. Mr. Menicoche.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just with respect to the transfer of funds, and to the motion to delete extra positions, I am not too sure how we need more positions, particularly if no one has explained to me about how it ran in the Housing Corporation. If the Housing Corporation did really keep eight positions for people needed to run this program, someone has never told me. But just with respect to creating new positions, at this point, I agree with my honourable colleague, Mr. Ramsay. There is something fundamentally wrong here. It appears to me that it is not being followed through.

As well, I spoke on this issue many times, as well. Basically, it is the whole harmonization issue that is coming through here. I was fundamentally against transferring any of the housing programs over to ECE. Now it is getting even worse. We are going to transfer money over, and now we want to create a whole bunch of positions. I have always maintained, as well, that programming dollars are important. If you are going to add $1 million in salaries, out of $30 million, that is getting up there in terms of administration costs to programming dollars, right up to unacceptable levels. I am not too sure the Housing Corporation handled $30 million in housing rental subsidies. I don't think they did it right with eight people, either. I thought they kind of transferred it over to the LHOs, but for ECE to do it and require seven people to do it, I am not too sure. I have always said it is better left in the Housing Corporation, and I maintain that. Just with that respect, it doesn't appear to be fully thought out. With that, I will be supporting this motion.

Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. To the motion. Mr. Braden.

Yes, absolutely, I will be supporting this motion. Mr. Ramsay has outlined, really, the principal cause of this for me. The Housing Corporation has, indeed -- we have been told this for months now -- been developing a new mandate. I still haven't seen it.

One thing that we know for sure is that the Housing Corporation will not have any responsibility for social housing. How is it that Cabinet says that we should approve half a million dollars, and that is just for about three months' worth of work? There are no positions in ECE. There is no offsetting balance in the year for the Housing Corporation, but all these jobs continue to languish in the Housing Corporation while we still don't know what the new mandate is. It doesn't take long to connect the dots on this one, Madam Chair. I will be supporting this motion. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Braden. To the motion. Mr. Dent.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I think that the Minister of Finance has already indicated that the Housing Corporation will be coming back in the not-too-distant future to talk about their new mandate, and, perhaps, some reallocation of resources in the long term. But you can't expect that there is going to be, on April 1st, a sudden transfer of the program, and that it can be delivered seamlessly without there being a period for training, and ramping up, of staff. Yes, there is always going to have to be some duplication. We are not talking about seven bodies. We are talking about because of increased workload. We are talking about, for instance in Rae, adding three-quarters of a position, so there will be part-time additions to help the staff there. We are adding some part-time assistance in Whati. We are adding part-time positions basically across the Northwest Territories, because of the increased workload for the income support staff. You can't deliver this much more of a program. We are talking about an increase in the number of clients that the staff will have to see. We are staffed, right now, based on the numbers of people that the staff see. So if you increase the numbers of clients that will go through the offices, we are going to have to staff up to deliver those services.

For the most part, we are not seeing seven people added in one community. We are seeing people added throughout the regions. It is a number of additional part-time positions that are being added, other than the three positions that are being added at headquarters. One of the three positions that we are adding at headquarters is an audit and compliance officer. We are doubling the total money that will be dealt with by income support workers. We have two compliance officers now. With the doubling of funding, we are thinking that we are probably going to have to do more compliance audits, so we are adding one more person.

Whether or not on an ongoing basis, some of the resources come from the Housing Corporation won't change the fact that we have to do the training and get the systems up and running before April 1st. It is not something that you can just move from one day it is being done this way, and the next day it is being done a different way. Members know what sorts of issues you are going to face from your constituents if the program doesn't work right on April 1st. If you really think that the income support worker is going to deliver the program on April 1st without having some experience and training, well, I think you are wrong. I think we are setting this whole thing up to fail. If that is what we are after, then fine, let's not go ahead with the training. But if we want to eventually see the economies that we might see by having a comprehensive and cohesive approach to how we deliver Income Security programs, if we want to bring all of the Income Security programs into one place so we can better plan for them, we have to take this step. This is the first step. Yes, there are some extra costs to implement a new program. It would be impossible to move forward with this without duplicating during some kind of switch-over period. We are talking about that period of time leading up to April 1st. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Dent. To the motion. Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I listened, quite intently, to what the Minister had to say. I didn't at one time hear the government say that it had looked at positions that are housed today at the Housing Corporation, and identify some positions to move over to ECE, which would mean that we wouldn't have to run out

and hire 11 new people. For me, that is the big issue here. The Minister can say all he wants about how it has to be seamless, and how we have to have people trained. I will tell you, Madam Chair, it came up here last week, 59 employees at the Housing Corporation. Why can't we look at moving 10 of them over to ECE to deliver this work? Is that too much to ask, Madam Chair? Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. To the motion. Mr. Krutko.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Housing Corporation will still have responsibility for managing the properties, through the maintenance programs that we have. We still have to maintain those properties. We'll still be responsible for collecting the rents. We will still have a lot of these responsibilities we have today.

With regard to the motion that the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment has stated, the assessment process that presently takes place with the clients will now be the responsibility of income support. Through that ongoing responsibility, they will have to take on an extra workload. We, as a corporation, will continue doing the work that we do today, by ensuring that our audits are done every year, that we do have financial accounting of our expenditures, and to maintain the properties we have, and expand those properties going forward, so we can provide housing to people in the Northwest Territories. I think the key is that the assessment portion of dealing with clients will no longer be the responsibility of the Housing Corporation. That responsibility will now be the responsibility of income support.

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. To the motion.

Question is being called. All those in favour of the motion? All those opposed? The motion is carried.

---Carried

---Applause

Education, Culture and Employment, special warrants, total department, $4.066 million, and not previously authorized, now $4.871 million. Agreed?

Agreed. Thank you. Transportation, not previously authorized, total department, $2.514 million.

Agreed. Thank you. Industry, Tourism and Investment, operations expenditures, not previously authorized, total department, $2.191 million.

Agreed. Thank you. Environment and Natural Resources, operations expenditures. Mr. Braden.