Sergeant-at-Arms, can you escort the witnesses in, please. Thank you.

Mr. Minister, maybe you can introduce your witnesses, please, for the record.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To my right is Mr. Sandy Kalgutkar, the director of budget evaluation, to my left, I should say; to my right is Mr. Charles Tolley, the manager of budget development.

Yesterday, we left off on page 11. Please turn to page 11 of Bill 8, Supplementary Appropriation Act, No. 1, 2007-2008. Municipal and Community Affairs, operations expenditures, directorate, not previously authorized, negative $6,000.

Community operations, not previously authorized, $1.222 million.

Regional operations, not previously authorized, $19.999 million. Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I moved that $291,000 be deleted from the activity regional operations under the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs operations expenditures, not previously authorized, on page 11, for the provision of funding for two regional resource development impact advisor positions. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The motion is on the floor. We will hand out the motion right now. Thank you.

The motion is going to be handed out shortly, so we will take a short break. Thank you.

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There is a motion on the floor. The motion is in order. To the motion. Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I wanted to move this motion because I feel that we have some positions already dedicated to resource development and with everything slowing down, I don't see the need, to be quite honest with you, to have two more regional development impact advisory positions in the regions. I am concerned as to where they would go. I have no idea if they are going to be going to Yellowknife, Hay River or Inuvik.

I just feel, Mr. Chair, that we continue to come up with all these titles and put money into it and that money could be better spent, in my opinion, on programs. We have some programs out there that money could be put towards. You look in the paper, Mr. Chair, and you see some of the titles that they come up with and the amount of money that they are paid at. I am just starting to see that we are not in the job or the position of creating employment. It seems to me like it's too much of what we are doing lately and I really feel that this $291,000 could be better spent elsewhere and with the pipeline talk and all the resource development slowing down to a snail's pace, then I see no need for two regional impact advisory positions. I think we should have the capacity within the 4,600 employees of the GNWT to do the work that we are asking these two people to do. It's a lot of money, Mr. Chair. For that reason, I was more than happy to move this motion to delete the $291,000 and I will stand by it. Thank you.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to ask the Minister if he could provide some detail on these positions. I can't ask questions on a motion, Mr. Chair? Okay. Well, then we'll go with ...

Thank you. You have to speak to the motion, Mr. Braden.

Thank you, Mr. Braden. We understand from some of the background research that committee has done into this, that the location of these two positions has yet to be determined. So we don't know which regions or which communities they are going to go to. In fact, similar positions that have been recruited for in the past have been extremely difficult to recruit to. On this one, I am with Mr. McLeod. I looking at the amount of resources, both PY and financial, and it should be noted here that this is $291,000 for two positions. I am assuming that includes travel and related expense to this job. So these are not inexpensive positions. One thing that our information did not give me a good insight into, Mr. Chairman, was the function. Just what do these jobs do? They are called regional resource development impact advisors. I know that we have a lot of resource related advisors and expertise already in the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment. We have a pipeline office created by the GNWT ostensibly to coordinate and bring this kind of thing together. What function are these positions have for MACA? I was not able to secure a satisfying answer on how the performance and the objectives and results are measured from what these positions would do. So in the sense that we seem to have beefed up a whole bunch of preparation capacity and awareness on pipeline and resource impacts, but to the point where I can't really see what is the value of putting almost $300,000 of taxpayers' money into this.

I guess another aspect of this was that while it was suggested that these two positions would be located in one of four communities; Inuvik, Norman Wells, Fort Simpson or Hay River, depending on the choice of the successful candidate if they are found. Now these are regional resource development advisors. In the North Slave region and in the South Slave region, except for what we might call Hay River and Fort Simpson, there is not a lot of oil and gas activity going on, but there is a bunch of other stuff. Would these positions have anything to do with resource activity going on, for instance, in this region, in the Yellowknife region? According to this list here, by the selection of which communities they could be stationed in, probably not. So, Mr. Chairman, I don't see the value in this. I support the motion.

Thank you, Mr. Braden. On my list, I have Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to support the motion that is before us for many of the reasons my colleagues have talked about. With all due

respect, I think to my colleague from the Sahtu and others, I know these are regional positions, but I have been consistent with challenging the government on job position growth and I am believer, Mr. Chairman, that the government has a systemic inability to manage its human resources, always has had and continues to have. We really need to focus more on the future and come up with a comprehensive plan.

What I see happening, Mr. Chairman, is the government just reacting to things, knee-jerk reactions and hiring people as a result of knee-jerk reactions. This is just a case in point. The Hay River pipeline office is another case in point. The macroeconomic policy shop is another case in point, if I could. Those positions are in Yellowknife. I question those. I question these. I think we really need to put the brakes on position growth at least until the 16th Assembly comes through the doors and they can conduct a zero-base review of all positions government wide. I don't agree with these positions. Coordination on the pipeline file, in my opinion, continues to be haphazard at best. Again, these were only supposed to be for two years, these positions. We are going to keep them around for another couple of years. Haven't they concluded the work they were intended to do? There is no resource, Mr. Chairman. There is none. So are we fooling ourselves or what? I can't see us supporting this, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. Next on the list I have Mr. Michael McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I spoke to this yesterday and I wanted to say a few more comments, make a few more comments. This is a continuation of positions that were allocated a couple of years ago on term, four positions, that have sunsetted now. The idea was to have some bodies in the communities that were impacted by, first of all, the pipeline project and other resource development that is going on. A lot of work has been done. Yesterday, there were comments a made that MACA should have all the baseline information that the communities have in terms of infrastructure and capacity. That hasn't been the case. We haven't done that kind of inventory as to what each community has, what each community owns, what kind of people are in the community. Those things had to be compiled. That's a process that we've embarked on and we've completed roughly 50 percent of the communities. There are a lot of issues still out there. We need these people to continue with the ongoing discussions for the socio-impact agreement and some of the sub-agreements that need to be done. We need to work with the communities to develop proposals and access some of the new federal funding that has come available and we have to continue towards facilitating conferences and things of that nature, to ensure our communities share the information. '

This has been something that has been raised to us in a number of situations. We have been lobbied by the aboriginal governments, the Inuvialuit, the Gwich'in, but we need to pay attention to the communities. This is a method of responding to that request. I guess if you believe there is no resource development out there, we wouldn't need these positions, but there is. It's in the different regions.

The other question that was raised was about where these were going to be located. The intention was to locate them in Inuvik and Norman Wells to deal with the pressures in those areas. So, Mr. Speaker, the process is still the biggest thing is to be able to represent the communities. The proponent for the pipeline has indicated to us that they need one voice to deal for the communities. The larger centres have had intervener funding provided for them so they can deal with their own issues within the municipalities. All the other communities, aside from the four large centres, don't have any intervener funding. So they would have to do it on their own. The proponent has indicated that they are not going to work with each community individually. They will deal with one government department. That department is MACA. If they need to go into the community, if they need to use the resources, there will be only one agency that they will deal with.

It is going to be very difficult to live up to all of those responsibilities if we don't have some positions dedicated to it. Mr. Speaker, in a nutshell, that is why we needed these positions. I am hoping that we are going to have the support that we can have these positions on the ground in the communities to deal with all of the pressures that they are facing. Thank you.

Thank you. Mr. McLeod. Next I have Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The motion here, I am going to not support the motion, as my colleague from Inuvik has moved it, and also Members that want to see a deletion here.

Mr. Chair, I beg to differ from the opinion of my colleague from Kam Lake. There is a lot of activity happening in the Sahtu region. There are about six or seven companies that are very interested just in oil and gas. There are diamond mine explorations that are happening there, so there is...Again, I could talk later on with my colleague here in terms of activity that has happened in the past. I just got off the phone with Husky Energy. They are looking at some activity happening next year in the Sahtu region. We saw what it is like in the region for the impacts. These are just small-scale projects that they are calling 10 or 13 million dollars small ones. For our community, that is very huge and very big. We certainly need their help.

In Inuvik, in 2004, we sent representatives to the Inuvik conference. That was what the conference was asking for, help from our government. Later on, I saw a conference happen in Norman Wells where MACA brought in a bunch of people also to other departments. They were asking for help. We don't do this. We leave them alone. There is no one there that is going to help our communities. They are going to be on their own. Did we do that down this way here when they had other activities happening? I don't know. Did we leave them alone to fend off with the diamond mines and other departments for impact benefits? I don't know. But we certainly listened to the people in my region to see the benefits of these impact advisors coming into our communities and working for us. I saw some of the work that has been done. I saw that it has been good work.

We are there to help the people. I think that is a good investment here of $300,000. It is peanuts compared to what is coming down the pipeline. People's lives. We just talked about one issue here in the orders of the day. We talked about the impacts of the one issue that we are

going to be dealing with. This socio-economic agreement is going to be dealing with our aboriginal governments, with the proponents, Mr. Chair. The benefits to the community far outweigh if we delete this funding here. The benefits, we are going to have more issues to deal with. By adding this in here, the benefits are going to be tremendous for our region.

Mr. Chair, the communities have been asking how do we get involved with the socio-economic agreements. How do we know when to kick our plans in? How do we work with these governments here? Mr. Chair, the timing of the pipeline, well, we could have a best guess as to when the pipeline is going to be built. You know how long it takes to be a journeyman, how many years. It is about four years. You go to school every day, hand in your reports and do the time. It is about four years to do it right on the button. If you drag, sort of take another year or so, these impact advisors can really help us in our communities in terms of preparing ourselves and getting ready to have this socio-economic agreement be honoured by Imperial and the proponents to this agreement. I am thinking here.

Mr. Chair, I think our communities deserve it. As for me, if we don't do this, we are going to throw them out to the wolves to fend for themselves. Some will do pretty good; some won't do so good. I am not sure as to why we want to have the deletion of this here. In 2004, the people asked us to help them. Now, in 2007, we are saying no, we are not going to help you anymore. So I want to say that to my Members here to really think this through. I won't be supporting the motion, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Next I have Mr. Villeneuve.

Mahsi, Mr. Chair. I will probably not even be voting on this motion. I haven't really decided yet, but I would like to hear everybody's arguments here. I know they are all good ones and they do all have a lot of weight that we have to consider. What I look at also is basically these are intervener positions and resource development impact advisor positions, pipeline positions, whatever you want to call them, whatever title you want to give them, basically they are all pipeline driven. To me, the pipeline is not anywhere in the near future anymore. It is a couple or three years down the road. We do have a pipeline impact office that is supposed to, and should be I would think, doing all of this kind of resource development impact advisory role for the regions up and down the valley. On the flip side, there is all the federal government funding that has been thrown in the regions up and down the valley to deal with the socio-economic impacts, resource development impacts and everything else that is going to be following with the pipeline. The federal government is doling out lots of money for that with this government included. There is also a lot of money sitting on the sidelines should that pipeline get the go ahead. There is around $500 million that the federal government has sidelined for socio-economic impacts. So all of these things, we put them all in one pot, that is a lot of impact advisory dollars and stuff like that. To me, just throwing an extra $300,000, I know it is not a whole lot of money when you look at the big picture, but I have to agree with some things that Mr. Braden was saying. Your value for money and this one is really hard to swallow. I understand Mr. Yakeleya's point of view. Sometimes the regions need the assistance and they need the advice of experts in resource development. But on the flip side also, sometimes the regions come out at the end of the day and say, gee whiz, we weren't given the right advice. We should have done it on our own. We didn't want it that way. Why is the government making decisions for us? There are always two sides to every argument on this one here.

I like to look at it on a human resource side of things that this government has. We have a lot of human resources out there and so do the communities. I would rather see maybe some of this money going right to the community level and saying, well, you give us an inventory of what you have in the community. I am sure they can pump it out in one day. I am sure a band manager or a community settlement manager can come back to MACA in one day and tell them everything about the community that they have and the people that they have available for resource development or what they should be doing to mitigate the impacts of resource development. That, for me, is a really tough call. I understand MACA's point of view too, that this has already been developed, researched and looked at. This is the conclusion that they have come to, but, again, it seems like this human resource growth in public service is just steamrolling ahead. It seems like we are getting ahead of ourselves in just hiring and hiring, like Mr. Ramsay said, knee-jerk reactions to needs that I think we should do some reprofiling and reassessing of exactly what those needs might be and how we can use the people at the community level more to address their own concerns as opposed to hiring somebody from wherever to go into communities and tell them what they should do or not do.

With that, I will just be reserving my decision until the vote. Thank you, Mr. Chair.