Thank you, Madam Chair. I thank committee for its indulgence on this motion. I want to start off by saying that this to me is a principle and last year the Minister will remember quite clearly, when the issue came up about Human Resources and why there were so many problems there and issues there, and the fact that they had to go out and hire the Hackett Group from the United States to come in and do some business process type of work inside the department. I told them last year and I'll tell them again today, the government knows where those problems came from. If there were problem departments that weren't doing the work previously, the government knows which departments those are. Human Resources knows which departments those are. Why couldn't the government go back to the various departments where these boxes and boxes, as the Minister says, of files that weren't actioned over the years go back and get the money back from the departments? Somebody has to be responsible here. I said this last year and I'll say it again today, somebody has to be responsible. There's a responsibility factor here. I'm not quite sure if I'm getting my point across, but I'm trying the best I can, Madam Chair, to do that today.
Now, in this supp, HR is coming back looking for another $2.1 million. A component of that is $682,000 that's going to salaries and benefits for their employees. It doesn't make much sense to me when the Minister again says it's the problems that we inherited from the departments. So we let the departments get away with not doing their work and now the supp comes forward and we're just supposed to sit here and accept it and rubberstamp it and say, okay, Human Resources, you keep doing the work that you're doing and we'll keep receiving the phone calls from our constituents that things haven't gotten any better there. They haven't. I still get phone calls from people whose pay is messed up, benefits are messed up. We have to do better.
I know it's still in its infancy, I know we're working on the problems, but somebody has to take responsibility. Just coming and trying to get the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories to fork over more money for mistakes without pointing fingers and getting some people to take responsibility...If there are DMs out there, if there are managers of HR, former managers of HR in the departments that never did their job, you know what? I want to know about it. We should concern ourselves with that. Because you know what? They're probably still working for us. That's why we should be responsible. That's why I hope my colleagues would see to it that we delete this money, we send a message to the government, we're not going to accept that. We can't continue to accept that type of activity to take place, Madam Chair. It's that simple. Thank you.