Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ve got some more questions today for the Minister of Transportation, getting back to my Member’s statement where I talked about delays in construction. Going back to some of the things the Minister has said in the past, he had mentioned to the House and to Members that construction would take place from both sides of the river on the project to ensure the completion date of November 2011. It would appear that that’s not happening, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to ask the Minister why construction hasn’t taken place on both sides of that river so that it could meet in the middle as the Minister had told this House previously. Thank you.

Minister of Transportation, Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The plan is to still meet in the middle, but the approach has changed somewhat, as the Member has indicated. The delay in steel has caused the approach to change. The plan is now to

work on the north side and things are going very well. The contractor has been doing some very good work in launching the steel. We should be hitting the fourth pier or the final pier on the north side relatively soon and construction will continue with the tower as we deal with the breakup of the ice. The plan is to have all the trusses be worked on and put together during the breakup time and be ready for launching as soon as the river is clear.

Mr. Speaker, we still are working towards our goal of having the bridge opened in the fall and there’s no denying there are challenges out there. The delay of steel is one. The breakup of the river is another one, and as I indicated the other day in questions during question period, the ability for us or for our contractor to do work that was planned for warmer weather that has to be done in the cold season or the latter part of the fall is something that we have to work out.

There are many things that are out there that challenge us almost every day. If the weather is colder than minus 35, then we for sure have to take into consideration the safety of the workers and I think there’s a policy that restricts them from working in that temperature. If there are strong winds, they can’t be up on the towers. Those towers are way up in the air on top of the ice and that’s an issue. Also, we were challenged this year when we were caught off guard with the ferry shutting down. That was also cause for delay.

So there are many things. We are in continual contact with the contractor and I’m very confident we have a good team and things are continuing to move forward.

I thank the Minister for that. Part of the initial budget on the $92 million contract between the Deh Cho Bridge and Ruskin would not have included the need to take out that temporary bridge and put it back in again a few weeks after breakup to allow construction on the south side. I’d like to ask the Minister how much is taking the temporary bridge out and putting it back in going to cost and who’s going to pay for that. Thank you.

Thank you. It’s a difficult situation we’re in. We have our contractors that are listening to this discussion, we’ve already been contacted by the contractors raising concerns over some of the Member’s comments that are in the contract. There’s a proprietary issue that we’re dealing with here. These issues are dealt with in the contract. I’m not in a position to disclose it at this time, Mr. Speaker. I’ll have to reassure the Member that these issues were things that were taken into consideration. Thank you.

I appreciate the work the contractor is doing there. My apologies for trying to get some answers on the $200 million that the taxpayers of the Northwest Territories have hanging out there on this project. So, again, I’m going to ask questions

and continue to ask questions about this project in an effort to protect the taxpayers here in the Northwest Territories and find out what our real risks are with this project.

I’d like to ask the Minister again, yesterday I asked him a pretty straightforward question: who would be responsible for cost overruns and construction delays on this project? Would it be the Government of the Northwest Territories or would it be the contractor? The Minister mentioned something about potential loss of revenue due to the contract going past the completion date. It wasn’t what I was looking for. I just want to know whose responsibility it is. Thank you.

It would depend on who the responsibility of the delay or the cost overrun, who it would apply to. If it was the contractor’s issue, then they would have to eat those costs. If it was the responsibility of our government, if it was an issue that could be attributed to something we did or we were responsible for, then we’d have to pay for it.

Final supplementary, Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Again, I thank the Minister for that. In the interview the project manager did with the CBC he said the bridge’s general contractor, it will be up to them to figure out how to make up the lost time and pay for any added costs. I’d like to ask the Minister, is that exactly how this is going to work? Thank you.

Yes, but, Mr. Speaker... Mr. Speaker, that’s correct, but if there are any issues that arise that are attributed to something we’ve done or that are under our responsibility, then we would have to absorb those costs. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement today I talked about NGO funding, multi-year funding. We have a fine group of volunteers in Hay River who went to some amount of work out of a genuine concern for offering services and programs to persons with disabilities in Hay River. We should have multi-year funding. They ended up with funding for one year. The funding was late in coming. There was no discretionary latitude applied to the money that they had received to allow them to re-profile some of those funds for the months that had been lost while they waited for approval.

I realize that we need to have accountability for contribution agreements that we make to NGOs. There needs to be accountability, but we need to find a balance between burdening those NGOs down with endless compiling of statistics, and reporting, and report writing, and application proposal writing, with actually doing the work that they want to do and that is on the front-line helping those people. I can tell you that the program in Hay River has been extremely successful.

I would like to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services and Minister responsible for Persons with Disabilities, what can we do in the future to avoid this?

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Listening to her questions as well as the Member’s statement, I want to say first off that we do provide multi-year funding to organizations. We review them on a case-by-case basis. So I want to state that to start with.

There are two issues the Member is raising. One is there are some specific situations here that happened with respect to this organization whereby they asked to make adjustments specifically, and I would like to look into that and I can commit to look into those details and see how we could accommodate. Secondly, I will undertake also to see if we could look into doing multi-year funding with this organization.

It seems like it would be a lot of work to judge each application, each proposal, each funding agreement individually. Are there not guidelines, parameters that, for example, four months into a fiscal year an NGO has their funding approved? In the meantime they have not been able to procure the services of an office manager or Internet services or different things that they would have on a monthly basis. Then they receive their funding four months into that fiscal year for the full year, but they’re only allowed to spend per month what was in the proposal. Is there not a standard? Would it really require the Minister to judge those individually or could there not be a standard policy whereby if the NGO was seen worthy of that contribution, that they would also been found to be worthy to make a judgment call about, for example, increasing the hours for the remainder of that fiscal year for their office personnel, for example?

Ideally when a group gets funded they should be given enough notice to make adjustments between fiscal years and to be able to plan. I’m not sure if you need a multi-year arrangement to do that, because an argument could still be made that even if you had a multi-year, if there’s some kind of an operational and

procedural delay, that’s the issue there in what the Member is saying. Without knowing details of the situation, I don’t know what happened to have the delay and also why some of those very specific adjustments that were requested were denied. I think we should leave room for some of the financial accounting rules or some other rules that we’re not aware of in this Chamber that our officials are asked to follow. This is why I’d rather undertake to look into this and get back to the Member with a more detailed answer. I am willing to be open-minded to look at some options.

In the case of this particular NGO I would certainly be happy to provide the detail to the Minister on the delay in approval, the delay in commencing the services that would normally be carried out by this office, and the amount of money that was related to that delay and get the Minister’s approval, I guess, if that’s the level that we have to take it to, to get the Minister’s approval to have that money re-profiled and reallocated for the remainder of that year. I’m happy to provide that to the Minister. I’m just hopeful that an NGO would not have to in all instances make such an application, that there would be something within the framework, within the policy of the funding and contribution agreements that would, when we know it’s a delayed approval, it’s a delayed receipt of funds in that year and so many months have gone by, that there would be a way of making a more blanket policy that that funding could be spent by that NGO in that remainder of the fiscal year.

I think I can safely state that just for our department there are lots of NGOs that we fund that are delivering many, many really substantive programming, like YWCA, Sally Ann, all of our...I don’t know. I don’t want to exclude anybody. They have the stability of funding. All those applications do not come up to my office where I need to review them. So I think we need to accept that there are different types and sizes and characters of NGOs and I want to assure the Member that I don’t micromanage in that way. This is why I just want to undertake to look at this situation and see what happened from an accounting and procedural point of view. I will look to see if this group is one that could be considered for multi-year funding, if that’s what could have prevented what’s happening here. It’s because there are so many kinds of NGOs it’s hard for me to say that we could just do a blanket approach in this way.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. The honourable Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister of Health and Social Services and follow up on my Member’s statement. I looked at the Minister’s statement on Nutrition Month and I see a real focus of programs on obesity. Poor nutrition during the youngest years for people, though, is a likely reason for nutrition-related issues like obesity in older children and adults. Yet the Minister’s statement offers no programs that actually put nutritious food in the mouths of our youngest citizens. Why is that?

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The honourable Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member knows that it’s the Department of Education, Culture and Employment that has programming for providing support for food in schools. Education, Culture and Employment has extensive school nutrition programs.

I’m certainly aware of a number of programs that have been dropped from our programs. This House is on repeated record calling for providing nutritious food or subsidizing milk for our youngest people that are not receiving a nutritious diet. What has the Minister done either within the Department of Health and Social Services or in concert with her ECE colleague to serve the will of the House on these directions?