Thank you, Madam Chair. This is a process. If we were to introduce, say, an association of some sort and say that all contractors must be certified under this system as of today, we would be eliminating the majority of our contractors in the small communities. We would be eliminating the majority of our contractors in the NWT, period.
We need to work with the contractors. We need to move into this process. Eventually we do hope to have everyone covered under some sort of certification indicating that they do have safety certification to be on any job site, but how we introduce that does take some time. We need to ensure that we’re in touch with all contractors that work for us.
When you consider that anybody that could be cleaning our offices and cleaning this building, right to individual contractors that are on site on our biggest jobs, if we’re going to make sure that every one of those people are certified before they get on site, like I said, we will be eliminating a lot of people.
We need to work with our contractors. We’ve developed these contractors over the years. Now, the safety is an important issue and we’re moving towards that. We’re moving into that direction, but to have a drop dead date and say everybody has to be certified at this point would not work. We would essentially eliminate too many of our contractors and we would almost come to a standstill unless we’re bringing contractors up from the South.
We will commit to having the majority of the individuals safety certified to be on our sites by the end of the next fiscal year. If we have the majority of them done and it’s not going to affect our
business at hand, then we’re able to move beyond that. We’re able to say then that if most people are certified, then we’re able to put in the contract that you must be certified in order to do this job.
Just as an example, if we have a building under construction and we indicate that the principal contractor, which could be us, but the principal contractor, the main contractor, the general contractor on site has to be certified, then every single individual contractor, big and small, that goes on site has to be certified. We have to be aware of that as well.
Once we move into this area and we start making this a hard and fast rule for contractors in the Northwest Territories with government programs and we make that decision, there’s no turning back, so we have to move cautiously to make sure we’re not leaving people out in the cold.