This is page numbers 4927 - 4952 of the Hansard for the 16th Assembly, 5th Session. The original version can be accessed on the Legislative Assembly's website or by contacting the Legislative Assembly Library. The word of the day was work.

Topics

The Speaker

The Speaker Paul Delorey

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. The honourable Minister responsible for the NWT Housing Corporation, Mr. Robert McLeod.

Robert C. McLeod

Robert C. McLeod Inuvik Twin Lakes

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is a concern that we heard and a particular example was a material contract for supplying material. There was some belief from some of the district suppliers that they were unfairly treated because they were looking for a territorial-wide issue. That has been resolved. A lot of local material supply tenders are going out. As far as the Member is concerned, there was a time when there were a lot of labour-only tenders that were let and it benefitted the small communities. Some of them have built up their capacity and are able to compete on the supply, ship and erect. Obviously, it is still a concern. This is a discussion that I will have to have with the corporation and see if we can find a way to resolve it so the local supplier would benefit from the tenders that are let by the NWT Housing Corporation. Thank you.

David Krutko

David Krutko Mackenzie Delta

Mr. Speaker, I think this is all in with the Housing Corporation but other government contracts. I think we have to debundle these contracts in such a way that people have advantages of taking the segments of the contract that meet their particular needs regardless if you are a plumber, carpenter, electrician, and I think that we have to support those local sustainable contractors in the community so that they can remain in our communities. I would like to ask the Minister in regards to the whole idea. I talked to the mayor of Aklavik. He mentioned that they had a meeting with Housing. They talked about the invitational tenders for the community of Aklavik for contracts for that community. Is that something that this government is considering looking at?

Robert C. McLeod

Robert C. McLeod Inuvik Twin Lakes

Mr. Speaker, we are willing to look at all options. We have to recognize, though, that cost could be a factor. If it proves feasible to do, as the Member suggested, and go to some invitational tenders, that is something we will have to look at. But the bottom line is trying to control costs and trying to do economies of scale so we can put more units into the communities and

more maintenance work and repair work in some of the units. Thank you.

David Krutko

David Krutko Mackenzie Delta

Mr. Speaker, in regards to the contracting processes that I would like to ask the Minister, I know I mentioned negotiating contractors in my statement but also I have supported negotiating contracts for projects in McPherson and Aklavik which were submitted to the regional office which I gave to the Minister. It was supposed to go to Cabinet in April. I would like to ask the Minister what is the status of those contracts. Again, that is another avenue that has to be used but again we are not hearing anything back from Cabinet on that. I would like to get an update from the Minister. Why is that practice not being used?

Robert C. McLeod

Robert C. McLeod Inuvik Twin Lakes

My understanding is the applications are complete. We have had a few requests from negotiated contracts and that is something that we’re reviewing at the moment. The negotiated contract, we have used quite a few of them over the past few years in some of the communities and negotiated contracts are there to help communities build up capacity, contracted book capacity so they can compete in an open market, understanding that we still have an MOU that we try to follow as closely as possible. So to answer the Member’s question, and I’m just going on here, but we have received the applications, the applications are complete and we’re just reviewing them before we take our next steps. Thank you.

The Speaker

The Speaker Paul Delorey

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Krutko.

David Krutko

David Krutko Mackenzie Delta

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Also in my statement I talked about sustainable communities and the importance of this government to look at the social and economic benefits of these types of projects in our communities and ensure that the maximum benefit goes to the local communities because we are hurting in our communities with high unemployment, but more importantly we have to find jobs and sustain those jobs. So I’d like to ask the Minister exactly what the government is doing to ensure that we are sustaining communities with these projects and not seeing the money leave the communities and go to the regional centres.

Robert C. McLeod

Robert C. McLeod Inuvik Twin Lakes

Thank you. The government is making, the Housing Corp in particular is making more investment in the local housing building scene. We have, with the MNIs and the amount of repair work, we’ve got almost $50 million in repair work. I was talking to some of the local contractors in some of the other communities, they’re grateful for work, they’ve been very busy. I think more so now than ever with a lot of the training that the communities have had we’re seeing them start to take advantage and being competitive in the whole process and being able to get all the work that comes to the community, because we do have a lot of folks out in the

community who are well qualified now and are starting to take advantage of some of these. So we continue to invest in the communities as far as putting homes on the ground and doing repairs. Thank you.

The Speaker

The Speaker Paul Delorey

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.

Robert Hawkins

Robert Hawkins Yellowknife Centre

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As we all know, summer students have been returning to the Northwest Territories and certainly the summer student hiring window is very short. Many of the summer students strive and work as hard as they can to get an opportunity so they can bank enough money so that when they go back to the school in the fall they’ll have enough funds to get them through the year without any hiccups. But, Mr. Speaker, a parent brought forward a concern to me the other day and they were concerned about how the hiring process goes for summer students. In short, they said that they have found out that summer students are sometimes set aside for casuals. So in other words, the list goes from hiring a P1 summer student over to the casual list and they go to the P1 casuals and back to the summer student list, the P2s, then back to the casual list of P2s, and so on all the way down to P3 from thereon.

Mr. Speaker, the concern is quite simply this: why aren’t summer students put as a hiring priority by this government to ensure that they have the best opportunity to make some money so when they return to school they’ll be put on the best foot forward as we can certainly hope for them? Thank you.

The Speaker

The Speaker Paul Delorey

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The honourable Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Bob McLeod.

Bob McLeod

Bob McLeod Minister of Human Resources

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Summer students are given that priority. Thank you.

Robert Hawkins

Robert Hawkins Yellowknife Centre

Thank you. Well, I’ve been to the Minister’s office and it’s the process as I described before just earlier here today. So maybe the Minister can clarify for the record that summer students hired in the priority 1, 2 and 3 are priority over casuals whether they’re P1s, P2s or P3s. Thank you.

Bob McLeod

Bob McLeod Minister of Human Resources

Thank you. P1 and P2 summer students are a priority. We then go to aboriginal casuals and then we go to P3s. There’s really no issue here because every summer there is less than a 5 percent likelihood of an aboriginal casual employee being hired between the summer

because we do give direction that all departments should be hiring summer students. Thank you.

Robert Hawkins

Robert Hawkins Yellowknife Centre

Thank you. I appreciate the Minister for clearing that up on the record, especially because of the confusion both brought forward to me by the parent as well as the information I received from the department. Mr. Speaker, would the Minister commit to this House that he’ll make sure that all departments are clear on the hiring process to make sure that we follow the priority process he described here today to make sure we give our P1 and P2 summer students the best chance at getting a job? We want to make sure it’s clear to these departments. Thank you.

Bob McLeod

Bob McLeod Minister of Human Resources

Thank you. The Department of Human Resources endeavour to make sure exactly that happened. We have Human Resources staff meet with all departmental staff on a regular basis to review their requirements for summer student hiring, and every department is aware of the process and also the priorities for hiring students. We will be continuing to monitor the summer student hiring as we go forward. Thank you.

The Speaker

The Speaker Paul Delorey

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Your final supplementary, Mr. Hawkins.

Robert Hawkins

Robert Hawkins Yellowknife Centre

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I didn’t hear the Minister would make sure that he sent out an e-mail or an information blast to departments who do manage this file. I mean, the point I’m trying to make is the information I got even from his department seems confusing and perhaps wrong, and he’s cleared it up for the record and I appreciate that. I just want to make sure that that information gets out to all the departments to make sure they’re hiring in the same manner the Minister has described today, because if that confusion is out there, people will be missing opportunities that they rightly deserve. Thank you.

Bob McLeod

Bob McLeod Minister of Human Resources

Thank you. We have sent an e-mail to every department, we’ve sent it to every Cabinet Minister and we’ve sent it to every MLA. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Speaker

The Speaker Paul Delorey

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Member for Great Slave, Mr. Abernethy.

Glen Abernethy

Glen Abernethy Great Slave

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to follow up on some comments and some questions asked by my colleague Mr. Hawkins on the rebate, a possible rebate for oil tanks. Before I do that I just want to applaud the Minister of ENR and his department for putting in the public awareness campaign on oil leaks. I think it’s quite a good campaign and I think they did a wonderful job.

I also want to mention that in his response to Mr. Hawkins, the Minister indicated that we are investing a lot of money in alternative energy as a way to get off of oil, which I also think is great, but I think it’s important to remember that a lot of people have bought boilers or furnaces that operate on oil and they all have a lifecycle and the lifecycle for an oil furnace or an oil burner is significantly longer than that for an oil tank and these oil tanks are leaking on a more regular basis. We really want people who haven’t lived through the lifecycle of their furnaces to keep their oil tanks new and fresh so that we don’t experience leaks. So I think it’s important that we follow Mr. Hawkins’ recommendation and put in some rebate, but I’d like to encourage the Minister to consider, in doing that, rather than providing a rebate for replacing a single walled tank with a single walled tank, which is exasperating the problem, to consider looking at rebates for the higher quality tanks, the double walled tanks or the tanks with alarms, those type of things rather than just a rebate for putting in the same problem again and again and again. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Speaker

The Speaker Paul Delorey

Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. The honourable Minister responsible for Environment and Natural Resources, Mr. Miltenberger.

Michael Miltenberger

Michael Miltenberger Thebacha

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I agree with the Member that we want people to have the best failsafe products that are out there. I understand in Europe they do things considerably in a more advanced fashion than we do. The issue of double wall tanks, tanks with alarms to me only make good sense. I agree we don’t want to just replace a cheesy single walled tank with a new cheesy single walled tank. Thank you.

Glen Abernethy

Glen Abernethy Great Slave

Thank you. So I don’t think we heard the Minister say yes, I think we heard the Minister say that he is going to explore the possibilities. I just want to suggest to the Minister that right now if he was to do some pricing to go get a double walled tank or a tank with one of the alarms in it installed, it’s going to cost you over $4,000 to install, whereas if you want to put in one of the bad tanks and replace one of the bad tanks with a bad tank it’s going to cost you about $1,000. So I’d like to encourage the Minister to have his department go out and do some additional research into the costing of these options and, once again, to not only suggest that they look into it, but possibly agree to put in some level of a rebate to encourage those individuals to consider the quality tanks that are going to avoid leaks in the future.