Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. I’ll take that last bit as a comment. Committee, we’re on page 13, highways, not previously authorized, $42.258 million. Does committee agree?

Page 14, marine, not previously authorized, $656,000. Does committee agree?

Road licensing and safety, not previously authorized, $201,000. Does committee agree?

Total department, Transportation, not previously authorized, $48.183 million. Does committee agree?

Thank you. Moving on to page 15, Industry, Tourism and Investment, tourism and parks, not previously authorized, $711,000. Does committee agree?

Economic diversification, not previously authorized. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a couple of comments here. I understand that this money is for, I believe there’s office space that has been secured, but it’s for developing the office space. But this is for moving, transferring the Business Incentive Policy monitoring office from Yellowknife to Hay River and the motivation, according to our information, is a decentralization effort. But I’d just like to point out some of the fallacies here of the plan that this government is pursuing right now.

If you look at, in fact, the number of jobs per capita, Hay River, or the South Slave, has the highest proportion of government jobs per capita. I’m all for decentralization, but I believe it needs to be done in a smart and aware way within the context of what people are facing in communities. By contrast, I think it has something like 13 percent of government jobs, Yellowknife about 12 percent, and then we have regions like the Tlicho, which is down about 7 percent. Relative to their population, they are very low.

I think we need to be a lot smarter about how we do these things so that we achieve the things that we claim to be wanting here with this.

The other aspect to consider is, my understanding is that none of the staff are transferring. I stand to be corrected there, but I note in our briefing that we’re looking for staff here. Maybe I’ll just ask, is that the case and when are we expecting to fill these positions? I’m not sure this falls exactly under this infrastructure, Mr. Chair. I’ll let you or the Minister decide, but I think when we make these sorts of decisions and have these infrastructure costs associated with them, we need to put it all within the context of the big picture. I’ll throw that out there and see what people want to do in terms of response as we discuss this particular item.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. For that we’ll go to the ITI Minister, Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the Member for bringing the issue up. It was part of the government’s decision to look at decentralizing some positions. In this case, ITI had the Business Incentive Policy shop. It included four positions. We are currently out to competition for the manager’s position. The Member is correct; we didn’t have any of the four people that were in those… Actually, there are three out of the four positions that were staffed at the time and they decided to not relocate. We have moved the office there and our intention is to staff the office in Hay River. This is just part of the cost of us doing that. I would suspect, as we move forward and there are other positions decentralized, that we will have to look at incurring further cost to locate offices outside of Yellowknife. Thank you.

Thanks to the Minister for that response. That was pretty clear. I don’t really disagree with what he said there as long as we are doing decentralization intelligently. Decentralizing when there is already an overabundance relative to the rest of the territory of government workers is a strange process to achieve decentralization to me.

The other aspect is we want to know what the full costs are. Will the Minister commit to telling us how long these positions remain empty and this service is not provided and report to us regularly on that? I guess I would ask that the Premier do that, as well, as we go through decentralization so we are aware of full costs as we do this.

At some point I think decisions will have to be made. I would love to see decentralization done successfully. I think it is a real opportunity that we need to pursue, but again, it needs to be done with all our eyes open to achieve our goals. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, I didn’t want the Member to get the impression that the services were going unrendered. They are being delivered to the public, to the business community. That is being done from the staff here at ITI in Yellowknife until a manager is hired for the Hay River office and that our staff are hired for the Hay River office, but I will make a commitment to keep Members apprised of those positions.

As I mentioned, I fully intend to staff all four positions in Hay River and continue to move that effort forward, but we are servicing the public’s needs through a manager here at ITI.

As Members know, there is very seldom a week goes by where there’s not a question about the Business Incentive Policy, so we have had some activity there. We have handled that activity. We will continue to do so until we have that staff fully functional in Hay River.

I do take the Member’s point that we need to, when we do look at moving positions, that we have what the full cost of doing that is and we are able to secure office space and get an idea on what the costs are going to be associated with moving those positions. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, thanks for the Minister’s commitment. I guess there is an obvious concern if four PYs are being done by equal and other jobs. Obviously, they are not able to do their jobs, unless they are super people or unless we have a lot less work for them than what we are paying them for. Obviously, I don’t think we can count on that as something to give us assurance that the public is being well served. I know the Minister is aware that I appreciate that he is focusing people to be kept trying to do what they can to make sure the services are rendered until we are fully staffed up again, but there are obvious costs there. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. I will interpret that as a final comment. Moving on for questions on this page I have Mrs. Groenewegen.

I know I’ve had questions on this page or questions about Mr. Bromley’s comments, but I couldn’t help but hear him say that he is taking a ratio of government workers per population for the South Slave region which, in case he doesn’t know, Fort Smith region is not Hay River. That includes Fort Smith which, for all intents and purposes, is pretty much a government town compared to Hay River. It is a sad day that, after how many years of begging for a few decentralized positions out of Yellowknife, any Yellowknife MLA could not sit here and be very happy about some positions going out of here. If Yellowknife doesn’t think that they have a disproportionate amount of everything that this government spends money on, employs people in, then let’s have that debate in this House.

Thank you to this government that there are a few positions coming to a community like Hay River, Fort Smith and a few of the regional centres outside of Yellowknife. Good on this government. Like I said, it has been years of begging and cajoling. We finally have a government that is prepared to put their actions where they say their commitment is and we see this. It’s not large-scale, it’s small-scale, but at least it’s something and we’re happy about that. So I thank the government for that. But my goodness, to hear Mr. Bromley talk about the Fort Smith region as if it’s Hay River because we’re getting Business Incentive Policy jobs in Hay River, it’s sad.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say. Thank you.

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. We’ll take that as a comment. I

didn’t hear a question there. Thank you very much. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you. I feel like I’m at the witness table here, Mr. Chair.

---Laughter

But since the comment was directed at me, I appreciate hearing from the Member for Hay River where these jobs are being moved to. I’m sure it was an unbiased comment. I would ask the Member to check out the Hansard for today and see if I had any complaint whatsoever about the jobs leaving Yellowknife. I think I stated fairly clearly, perhaps abundantly clearly, that I support decentralization, done in an intelligent manner. But I still do appreciate my colleague’s comments, all of them. Mahsi.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Again, I treat that as a comment. Next on my list I have Mr. Bouchard.

I guess I needed to pipe in there a little bit about the comments on the Business Incentive Policy office in Hay River. We’re talking about four positions and Mr. Bromley is using statistics that have to do with the South Slave area where we’re looking at 300-and-some jobs versus 2,600. I mean, you can use a percentage if you want, but we’re talking about 300-and-some jobs compared to 2,600 in the Yellowknife area. So, I mean, it’s comparing apples to oranges, and I know this has nothing to do with the debate, but if we’re going to start debating this from the House and this is the first four positions we’ve decentralized, we’re going to have a lot of arguments here and it’s going to divide us a lot.

I understand my colleague’s concerns in the other areas and I’m supportive of decentralizing throughout the territory.

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. Again, I’ll treat that as a comment. Colleagues, if it’s okay, committee, I’d like to redirect committee back to Appropriation Supplementation 2013-14. We are on page 15. We last left off on economic diversification, not previously authorized, $158,000. Mr. Hawkins.