Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First and foremost, for the record, we have been living up to the commitments through the land claims. One of those examples is the MOUs we’ve signed with the Gwich’in in the past. We’re negotiating with the Sahtu, the Inuvialuit. But those are separate from land claims. That’s a process we’ve entered into to try and work with the corporations so that they can build up capacity in our communities in the North. We must recognize that.
Specifically in the community of Inuvik — and the Member has talked about the office space situation — 93 per cent of the space that is used by the Government of the Northwest Territories throughout a number of departments is leased space. We’re working with the private sector in those areas. In fact, some would say that when you look at the mix of the portfolio between owned and leased facilities, we have overextended ourselves on the lease side.
The move that’s been planned by the Department of Public Works, working with a number of departments, is to deal with one office space that is leased by another company; it’s called the Perry Building. That fell into some safety concerns there, and we had to move staff out and put them in a number of other places — not the most efficient use of our staff, the way they’ve been put in place.
The department had gone out and issued an RFP initially, and there were no responses back. After that, there were a number of responses, of proposals, after the fact. But because there’s interest from a number of groups, it was felt that a tender needed to go out on that space.