Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Premier and they follow up on the issue of contracts let at the ministerial level to prior Ministers and high-level government officials.

Recent revelations on the practices of sole-source contracting point out an absence of definition in contracting and verification of deliverables, poor or meaningless justifications for granting contracts on a sole-sourced basis, a lack of consideration or ignorance of possible conflicting interests of contractors, very slow disclosure of contracting activity, weakness of restrictions on acceptance of contracts by former senior politicians and senior officials, and sole-sourced contracts going to southern firms for services that might have been supplied by NWT businesses.

I’ll be raising some of these issues through the Board of Management, through a letter, to see if

those can be addressed, but in the meantime can the Premier say what measures he will be putting in place now to ensure that contracts are written to provide detailed and explicit definition of services and deliverables, and that the decision to sole source is justified with detailed and meaningful justifications as to why the sole-source recipient is the only possible source of the service, and including specific justification of the need to hire southern rather than northern firms? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.