This is page numbers 845 - 886 of the Hansard for the 19th Assembly, 2nd Session. The original version can be accessed on the Legislative Assembly's website or by contacting the Legislative Assembly Library. The word of the day was services.

Topics

Shane Thompson

Shane Thompson Nahendeh

Unfortunately, no. What we are trying to do is we are trying to understand how limiters have been operated across Canada. What we're trying to do is come up with a system that works for all residents. We are working with residents right now, with their power bills. If they need to, we try to give them avenues how they can get their power bills paid through ECE. We are also working with them to come up with a budgeting process that they pay a little bit more during the summertime so that their wintertime costs are not hitting them as big as it is. We're working with the clients. We're working with the system right now. I want to be able to make an informed decision because, if we don't, we're going to be having a whole bunch of people disconnected during the summertime, and we don't want to do that. We have made a commitment to take no limiters right now during the COVID-19. We're not charging interest on late power bills. We're working with the constituents. I've heard the Members from the other side, and we're trying to work the best we can with the system right now. I've made a commitment previously. We will work with the communities as we get this information.

Jackie Jacobson

Jackie Jacobson Nunakput

Just in regard to the limiters and to the bills for the communities, is it possible to get it under COVID-19? I'm going to ask that for my Finance Minister, if we could write that off? I have a few other things I would like to bring forward to write off, too, for the people. It's the only right thing to do. The Minister is responsible for the bureaucrats that are these board of directors. He could instruct them. They work for him. Tell them. Work together in regard to making it better for the people and the costing of our power corporation. Again, from August to April, we can't have those for the weather up in the Delta and in my riding. It's the coldest months of the year. Make sure that we are working with them to get through once this COVID-19 is over. It looks like it's a long way off because of no vaccine.

Shane Thompson

Shane Thompson Nahendeh

Yes, I will work with the Finance Minister to see if we can reach out to the federal government. Right now, we can't make a promise to do that. What I've made a promise in this House is we will work with the other side and people to make sure we look at this issue and to come up with an informed decision. As for the board, they are independent. They have the right to come up with their collective response. We're working with them. I believe the board has heard the concerns and we are moving forward on this. Yes, I will work with the Finance Minister. There is my "yes" for the day. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.

The Speaker

The Speaker Frederick Blake Jr.

Thank you, Minister. Member for Nunakput.

Jackie Jacobson

Jackie Jacobson Nunakput

Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When will the House see results of the work that the Minister tells us he has asked his deputy minister to do, developing options and reconstructing the Northwest Territories Power Corporation? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Shane Thompson

Shane Thompson Nahendeh

I was waiting for this question. I thank the Member for asking that. The board is working on it, and we are hopefully having it by the end of this month in something we can present in June. We are working on this. They are looking again across Canada to see how the boards are done, operated. Again, what we are trying to do is make sure it is an informed decision and work with committee on it. At the end of the day, it's about working together. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Speaker

The Speaker Frederick Blake Jr.

Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Yellowknife Centre.

Question 249-19(2): Small Business Grants
Oral Questions

May 28th, 2020

Page 856

Julie Green

Julie Green Yellowknife Centre

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment. As I said in my statement, I believe the GNWT has failed small business in this territory by not offering enough support through the pandemic. At the end of April, the Minister previewed her recovery plan and made the statement that some small businesses are expected to fail or scale down. My question for the Minister is: what is her responsibility to prevent small businesses from closing? Thank you.

The Speaker

The Speaker Frederick Blake Jr.

Thank you, Member for Yellowknife Centre. Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment.

Katrina Nokleby

Katrina Nokleby Great Slave

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When I made that statement, I was definitely talking about a global situation. That is what I had heard, that, globally, we would be seeing small business fail. Ultimately, my goal is to not have any Northwest Territories businesses fail through COVID-19, but of course, that is going to be a challenge as we are all aware. My role for small business is to be an advocate. I have been doing so. I know there has been conversation around: federal government is doing things and the GNWT is not. I would like for people to be aware that the way that the federal government knows what the GNWT or what the Northwest Territories residents need is through the lobbying efforts of myself and my colleagues here with them at our federal tables as well as our one-on-one meetings that we do have.

My role is to be the voice of small business. I do understand that small business is feeling not heard at the moment. However, we have introduced supports, and we quickly introduced the BDIC loan. It was actually rolled out on March 20th. The border closed March 21st. By March 25th, applications had ended and money was starting to flow, or it at least being assessed. I do not have the exact date of when payments would have started. I know there is concern that they were loans and not free money. However, in order to get that liquidity out fast to people, we wanted to be able to make the requirements less. There would have been a lot more requirements around getting relief funding out by just handing it out as a grant. We wanted to ensure people could access money quickly. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Julie Green

Julie Green Yellowknife Centre

Thank you to the Minister for that. I hear the Minister say she thinks she is done all she can, but small business mostly doesn't agree. I want to ask you specifically about BDIC. BDIC has a surplus of $30 million. Small businesses told me very clearly that they need grants, that in a situation where they are closed for good or their revenue has gone down by 90 percent, they are not interested in taking on more debt. My question for the Minister is: why didn't the Minister offer grants from BDIC to qualified businesses rather than loans?

Katrina Nokleby

Katrina Nokleby Great Slave

I don't believe I said that I have done everything I can do. I will say, though, that I am doing the best that I can to my ability. I have several areas of business and industry where I need to advocate for everyone. I am only one person, and I do acknowledge that there are things that we could be doing better. I believe I already answered the question as to why we went with loans instead of grants with the BDIC. However, I do commit to coming back to the Member with a more fulsome answer on that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Julie Green

Julie Green Yellowknife Centre

I appreciate the Minister's commitment to come back with a fulsome response. That is helpful. My next question is about the business advisory council. The answer to my colleague's questions yesterday indicated that this is a secret committee which would have the final say on whether to reveal their membership and their terms of reference and whether, in fact, we are going to know anything about them. Can the Minister confirm that this government is giving this council discretion to be a secret committee?

Katrina Nokleby

Katrina Nokleby Great Slave

What the question was yesterday was: would I make the terms of reference and the membership public? It was not whether I would share it with the Members on the other side of the room. No, this will not be a secret committee. The reason for my response yesterday was that I do not want to tie the hands of anyone prior to even having the first conversation with them. I am open to sharing that and posting that publicly. However, I will have that discussion with the council, and we will move forward as the council sees fit.

The Speaker

The Speaker Frederick Blake Jr.

Thank you, Minister. Final supplementary, Member for Yellowknife Centre.

Julie Green

Julie Green Yellowknife Centre

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate that answer from the Minister. It's actually imperative that you shore up the credibility of this initiative by making as much of it public as you possibly can as soon as you can. My next and final question is what this council is supposed to accomplish and over what period of time. Thank you.

Katrina Nokleby

Katrina Nokleby Great Slave

This council will be one of three that will be used by Cabinet and all of the government in order to be better informed by the stakeholders as was part of our 19th Legislative Assembly mandate and commitment priorities. We will be working towards making more evidence-based decisions by looking at or getting the feedback from the councils and their inputs, their recommendations. There will be reports provided that will be sent to the executive council and also shared as part of the co-committee that we will be having with the Regular MLAs and ourselves on economic recovery. The plan is to use the experts in the areas of their industries and sector in order to provide the better responses or the better relief packages or recovery packages that we can provide as a government. There is no way that we are going to be able to do it if we don't take feedback. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Speaker

The Speaker Frederick Blake Jr.

Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh.

Steve Norn

Steve Norn Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh

Marsi cho, Mr. Speaker. This is a question for the Minister of Finance. Just for some context here, on April 16th of this year, there were some liquor restrictions for sales that you announced. I have some figures in front of me that people are allowed to buy no more than six 375-millilitre containers of spirits or a maximum daily purchase up of $200 for individual customers. I have a two-prong question. My first part of that question is: how are these amounts determined? The second part of that is: what consultation was carried out with our Indigenous leaders prior to the announcement of these amounts? Marsi cho.

The Speaker

The Speaker Frederick Blake Jr.

Thank you, Member for Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh. Minister of Finance.

Caroline Wawzonek

Caroline Wawzonek Yellowknife South

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Liquor regulations are a regulation entirely within the department of finance and typically wouldn't necessarily be the subject of significant -- certainly not consultation as a legal concept but engagement, more generally. What we did do in this case, Mr. Speaker, is that certainly, at the same time that this was happening, there was a liquor-related motion by the Dene Nation that was made and a fairly lengthy response provided to them on April 7th. I was involved in an Indigenous governments' call that has been happening weekly now with the governments during the pandemic on April 9th to discuss the decision around closing of liquor stores. Then on April 15th, when the letter went out, that went out only after I would had that length conversation with the Indigenous governments and had received also correspondence from them. At that time, I sent a detailed letter to them to explain what was done. While that was the liquor changes that were made on April 16th that the Member makes mention of, they are regulations. They are changeable.

We got back on the phone and had another long conversation with the Indigenous governments on April 17th. On April 23rd, I had written to the Indigenous governments again, seeking their input on the changes to date and then some further changes that, again, a number of parties were requesting. On April 24th, I again went on to the Indigenous governments' call and had a lengthy discussion with them. At that point, set up a targeted call on April 28th, specifically with the Department of Finance to have a lengthy conversation with them around how the liquor regulations were working and whether further changes needed to be made. That is the one part of the question, Mr. Speaker. The second was on how the amounts were chosen. There was a real balance being struck between the desire to put some regulations that would create a restriction in place to try to target bootleggers, to try to target those who were buying mickeys, those who were buying large amounts and then taking them back to smaller communities, in particular, for resale, but also not to create a barrier that would hamper the health system by driving people to consume other types of alcohol. We looked at the kinds of consumption patterns that we could see, and we looked at who was being impacted and who was being targeted, and tried to target those who were seemingly purchasing for improper purposes, and not target the large proportion of individuals who can consume responsibly.

Steve Norn

Steve Norn Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh

Marsi cho, Mr. Speaker, and Marsi cho to the Minister of Finance for those responses. I listened very carefully to those responses, and some of the feedback that I got from some of our Indigenous leaders in my riding was that these amounts were still way too high. If we get six of us going into a liquor store, I'm going to make an example of say, Hay River, and then we go into one of the surrounding communities, we could still have a party for a very, very long time. Do you know what I mean? These amounts are still very high.

I guess my second part of that question: have there been any specific requests from our Indigenous leaders to lower these amounts since then? Marsi cho.

The Speaker

The Speaker Frederick Blake Jr.

Thank you, Member for Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh. Minister of Finance.

Caroline Wawzonek

Caroline Wawzonek Yellowknife South

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There have been requests around liquor for the last two months to impose complete bans, complete restrictions, to open it up, to make it available for sale from taxi cabs. I have had no end of requests and varying requests across the board. I simply can't accommodate every request because they are at opposites, one with another. I acknowledge that not every Indigenous leader's request to impose a complete ban has been followed. Obviously, that's not what we've done. Some of the Indigenous leaders who we spoke to were saying, "Please, just keep it as a simple restriction." There's not a simple solution to this, Mr. Speaker. I acknowledge that. I'm not going to make everybody happy with this one. We did our best to try to strike a balance between looking at the health system, looking at what we need to do to maintain the health system, trying to support some of the small businesses who were asking for changes to the Liquor Act, at the same time. As I've said on all of these calls, Mr. Speaker, the Liquor Act and the liquor regulations are not going to be where we address the fundamental problem of alcohol abuse in the territory. It's a crisis. It is absolutely a crisis, and it needs to be addressed in a much bigger way. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Steve Norn

Steve Norn Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh

Thank you for that response. Just listening, I want to thank you for staying engaged because I think that's a proper way to categorize that instead of consulting. I understand the need to keep businesses afloat, and it's so important because, like I've said, everybody's feeling the pinch during this crisis. On May 8th, I guess I mentioned, the class A and the class B licensed establishments are allowed to sell beer and alcohol with their food. I guess my final question is, what consultations were made with our local Indigenous governments before this was implemented?