It’s promising to hear we are going to be dealing with this. As I said earlier, $1,000 penalties that we claim we are going to look at in the year to come or two years to come will add up with time.
I want to ask a question in line with what the Member for Weledeh started to ask about rates. Currently, the Government of the NWT pays a 79 cent per 100 dollar rate. There has been discussion and debate out there whether or not that rate is relatively too low given our claims growth, our claims experience, our penalties and the fact that the business communities have been supplementing that so-called claims growth on the backs of businesses.
Now, I don’t expect the Minister to comment on the setup. That’s something for the other Minister, and I agree those are questions for WSCC in the future. But the point of my questions, Madam Chair, is we have a number of – I will use the term loosely – very poor performing departments, as the Minister indicated, we’ve got opportunity to improve. If we looked at comparing those very same departments in the private sector, our rate, our WSCC rate, would be well within the two or three dollars per $100. Yet, we couch those departments and wrap those departments, so to speak, with other
departments that have zero claims, as the Minister indicated – congratulations – but we are the benefactors of a relatively low rate. Vis-à-vis, the rest of the business world and the business community, I believe, is very upset.
Even though we did get a maximum 20 percent increase from 66 cents to 79 cents, are we paying our fair share? Is this government paying their fair share, is an extremely valid question, one in which we’ve asked many times here in the House before, and I will ask that question to the Minister. Given our claims growth, given our penalties, given everything that we’ve talked about today in WSCC opportunity, does $0.79 equate to what would be deemed what we’d see in the private sector for equivalent performance?