Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will start with the first part of that because I heard two questions in that one. Who's in charge? Definitely, the buck stops here is what people have told me. I'm in charge of it. However, as the Minister responsible for the secretariat, at no time do I micromanage. My direction to departments is not which contractor to hire or which person to hire. My direction to departments has been: make sure the money stays in the North that you're contracting with Northern companies, especially during the time of COVID-19 and our economy in a slump. My other direction to departments isn't about whether you hire one individual or another; it's: make sure you're hiring affirmative-action candidates is my direction. I just want to clarify that that's -- after that, then, I trust my deputy minister, associate deputy minister in this case, would heed my directions and move appropriately.
With the other question in the same question which was: was the camp infrastructure put out to tender? In this case, Mr. Speaker, it wasn't. There are allocations within our financial act that says that, if procurement is under a certain amount, you don't have to go through that process. I think that's just recently been changed, though, if I remember right. This time, time was limited. We approached a number of northern companies that could provide the service. We also asked for other companies' names that we thought could provide it.
In the end, Mr. Speaker, though, we did contract with a northern company to provide the services for the camp, and because the camp actually -- at this point, when we first put the camp facilities in, we did realize that we were one unit short. In that case, we did contracts with a South Slave company who had agreed to put that camp in place. Two northern companies. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.