EdinburghNLP/nunavut-hansard-plusplus huggingface dataset:
If you look back at what we just said Mr. Speaker, our constituents have come from total dependence on what the land had to offer and in a short period of time evolved in to being dependent on the technology available today.
I believe this begs the question, Mr. Speaker, what next?
But, before we go further Mr. Speaker, I believe this ignorance must stop.
It’s time to re-affirm our stand and join forces and protect through the solution-thinking process with the people of Nunavut. I say we as a government have been silenced for too long already. It is time to promote pride, togetherness, openness and sharing of responsibility.
I think it is time to show our support to the Inuit culture, languages, practises and beliefs with this government leading a team.
Then we can truly start measuring our successes and failures of the plan we will build.
(interpretation) Mr. Speaker, we can also look to make solutions available if we know what clues we have available to us.
With these, no shortages of people are willing to help made the situation right.
Many people will be able to have assisted this government to be representative of its people, including those that had been forgotten or the lack of recognition through ways of action and participation.
Sadly, Mr. Speaker, at this time, many of our elders are now retiring.
We regrettably have, also in the last seven years, lost elders and adults who will never get the chance to participate in the measure of our success or in the celebration of the small success we have achieved.
Yes, Mr. Speaker, we have often heard our elders are becoming members, but I think it needs to be said despite the fact that many elders have passed without participating, we still failed to allow them and those younger, with a good knowledge base, an opportunity to participate in further building of this government. (interpretation ends) Participation in this government in thinking that we will include all people in all age groups when we get this government up and running, think about that for a second, Mr. Speaker.
It will be that time when this government is running; we will include all people in all age groups.
But I say, Mr. Speaker, without them, we will not stand to see above or beyond the horizon as to where we can run.
And recognizing the fact that we, as a government, have failed to put in the plans. It is time to get off this straight, narrow railroad track, and set new paths with many more stops and turns.
We need to set new paths that will allow participation of the unique age group in our journey. Not with the use of solid cement roads either but, Mr. Speaker, rather flexible, red carpets.
Mr. Speaker, it is now time to take the best of both worlds and move forward to pursue the most we can of the missing Inuit knowledge.
To be able to say where we are in our journey regardless of what issues or hurdles we may have to overcome tomorrow and in the future, but together we can overcome them.
Mr. Speaker, I believe also that we should do this with a schedule so we will know where we are with a certain specified time frame and of what more we may need to try to accomplish within that specific period of time.
I hope you agree through a solution thinking process that it is time to make room and let the people who know how help us forward.
Let them tell us how and where we lack skills or when we are looking in the wrong places for the answers. They are all too eager. They just lack opportunities to participate.
What are we waiting for them to do? Or what are we waiting for them to say?
I do not think anybody can rise to tell me that I for one say that we not wait any longer. It is time to invite them in. After all, this is their territory and their government.
So with that, Mr. Speaker, I believe the time to make a plan is now; a plan for solution thinking by the people, for the people, and with the people.
Tabled Document 099 – 2(3): Nunatsiaq News Article (Tootoo)
I would like to table a copy of Nunatsiaq News article of February 17, 2006. The title of this article is: ‘Treat Disabled Child Properly, Judge Orders GN.’ Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Tabled Document 100 – 2(3): Schedule for the Student Loan Fund for the Year Ending March 31, 2005 (Picco)
I wish to table the following document: Schedule for the Student Loan Fund for the Year Ending March 31, 2005.
Speaker (interpretation): Please bring the documents to the table.
Tabled Document 101 – 2(3): Strategic Investment Program, Approved Projects by Community (Akesuk)
Tabled Document 102 – 2(3): A Consultation Based Review of the Harvester Support Programs of the Government of Nunavut and Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. Final Report (Akesuk)
I wish to table two documents. The first document is: the Strategic Investment Program, Approved Projects by Community, and I wish to follow with also the tabling of the document: A Consultation Based Review of Harvester Support Programs of the Government of Nunavut and NTI Final Report.
Tabled Document 103 – 2(3): Kitikmeot Health Centre Pamphlets (Aglukkaq)
Tabled Document 104 – 2(3): Kivalliq Health Centre Pamphlets (Aglukkaq)
Mr. Speaker, I would like table two pamphlets, information pamphlets out of Kivalliq and the Kitikmeot health centres.
>>House recessed at 15:36 and resumed at 16:05
In Committee of the Whole, we have the following items to deal with: Bill 5, Bill 6, Bill 9, Bill 12, Bill 13, and 14.
Mr. Evyagotailak: Thank you, Mr. Kilabuk, Mr. Chairman.
We wish to continue with the review of Bill 12, and the Department of Economic Development and Transportation, followed by the Nunavut Housing Corporation, the Department of Finance, and Justice, and Legislative Assembly.
You sure want a full day, don’t you?
Are we in agreement we first deal with Bill 12?
Chairman: Minister Akesuk, do you have witnesses you would like to bring to the table?
Hon. Olayuk Akesuk: Yes, please, Mr. Chairman.
Sergeant-At-Arms, could you please escort the witnesses in.
To my left is my Deputy Minister Alex Campbell, and to my right is Assistant Deputy Minister Rosemary Keenainak.
I remind members that we are dealing with Economic Development and Transportation. Branch Summary. Economic Development.
Total Operations and Maintenance. $24,767,000.
K-6, which includes K-7, K-8, K-9, K-10, K-11, and K-12.
Are there any questions from the floor?
I welcome the minister and his officials back to committee. I hope they had a restful weekend.
My question on page K-8, Economic Development Officers, Contributions to Hamlets, there is a decrease of $147,000 in that program.
I wonder if the minister could explain why there is a decrease.
For a reminder, members, please state the page numbers when asking your questions to the minister because K-6 has six pages attached to it.
We still contribute to the hamlets.
We put some of them in different areas within our government, but we felt that with the contribution that we give to our hamlets through the Economic Development Officers so it wouldn’t have too much effect.
Any more questions Mr. Peterson? Mr. Peterson.
I’m not sure if I understand the minister. Does every hamlet in Nunavut have a community economic officer that is funded under this program through your department?
Mr. Chairman, I can get Mr. Campbell to explain it a bit better, hopefully.
I am almost certain he will give it a try. Mr. Campbell.
In the budgets, we have submitted we have identified $90,000 for each community for CEDO funding. That is supposed to include salaries and benefits, our contribution to the community for that. For next year we are budgeting each and every one of the hamlets that still qualifies for $90,000.
The difference we have decreases as a result of reallocating some of our headquarters type training money that we had included in that fund before. Some of that money has been redirected to other pressures that you can see later on in our budgets submission.
Mr. Peterson: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank Mr. Campbell.
I have heard from quite a few hamlets that the $90,000 does not meet their needs and they are asking for more assistance to provide training and hire more qualified individuals.
I am wondering why you would not have just reallocated that $147,000 into the $90,000 to go along with the $90,000 and increase the contribution to the hamlets.
Hon. Olayuk Akesuk (interpretation): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The training dollars that we use will remain the same and that is where one of the changes is biggest.
We have moved some training dollars to other areas because we strongly believe that there should be training for our economic development officers when there is a high turnover.
We try the best we can to work on this and we will keep training a priority.
Thank you, Minister. Thank you for that information.
I guess my concern is that the government seems to want to keep economic development at the community level but the communities are having problems hiring qualified individuals or even retaining them, based on the amount of funding that they are receiving.
I am wondering if the minister can comment on whether there are any hamlets in Nunavut that have taken the position that the government should retain the economic development officer position in their community, rather than hamlet?
I think as a government we want to make sure that we have a close working relationship with the municipalities in the territory and again I take any concerns on the economic development officers. We’re welcome to discuss that issue with the communities that have concerns. Hopefully, every community that is in the same situation as some communities so in the long run we will have to look into that again to have negotiations again with the hamlets on the economic development officers in the future.
If there are any problems with the EDO in the communities we are willing to talk to them.
I guess I’ll rephrase my question. Are there any hamlets, or communities in Nunavut who have vacancies in the positions that they’re funded for under this program?
I’ll have Mr. Campbell answer that question.
I’m not aware of any vacancies, currently, right now. However, we do have two communities that are on contract services as opposed to an actual employee of the hamlet. Those communities are Arviat and Gjoa Haven.
We are in the process of reviewing the situation in Arviat. The mayor has written the department a letter for us to reconsider that contract arrangement and have the position move back to the hamlet. In Gjoa Haven we a service contract with an individual to provide that service in the community.
I thank the minister and Mr. Campbell.
Could Mr. Campbell elaborate on why the hamlets wanted to give positions back to the government?
I’ll get Mr. Campbell to answer the question.
The reasons why the communities have tried to turn over the responsibility back to the government is because they feel that there’s not adequate funding provided to the communities to employ qualified CEDOs. They’re concerned that we don’t provide enough training money.
They’re concerned that the salary is not sufficient and that we don’t provide housing and other benefits for the positions.
We are accepting the positions back to the government, the department itself, and the minister himself, that would be a step backwards in devolution, devolution of these responsibilities to the communities.
If the government takes over the responsibilities of these CEDOs the funding that would be required has been estimated at the range of 125 to 150 per staff person. With those kinds of numbers, we’ll also be challenged in the government to find the money from within our budget to allocate money for that service.
We provided an increase to the CEDO funding two years ago; $80,000 is what we funded them before, we increased that a couple of years ago to $90,000.
The department will be revisiting that amount again these next main estimates brought.
That’s good information to know.
I’m not sure if everybody is aware of how vital these positions are to communities because the entire department is pretty much based on having Community Economic Development Officers in the communities to deliver programs and services through your department.
If you don’t have a trained, qualified, happy individual in the position in the community, then entrepreneurs, or organizations that are seeking help from the department, they’re just not going to be able to access your programs, and consequently the entire community suffers. I’m sure you guys are aware of that.
I appreciate what you’re saying about funding levels. I know several years ago, when I was with the Kitikmeot Inuit Association, we took over the economic development officer in Taloyoak/Kugaaruk, and it was costing us $150,000 a year to support that position because it’s two communities, so it not a cheap proposition.
We had to support them with training, salary and benefits, and housing benefits and some travel money.
As well, some money was needed to help hire consultants to help assist them to help their clients. So it’s not a cheap proposition.
I encourage you to do what you can to help them out because I think it’s important. You said devolution and years ago when it was the Government of the Northwest Territories they called it Community Empowerment.
When we were joking around in Cambridge Bay we called it deficit reduction. The government called it one thing and we called it something else.
The government couldn’t do it at $150,000 or $120,000 but the hamlets were supposed to do it with $90,000. In this day and age of increasing importance of economic development to our territory, you’d expect that it be more and not less. The hamlets all have pressing demands under programs and services, so it’s kind of an interesting discussion.
On page K-9, I wanted to touch on the Nunavut Film Commission.
There’s $650,000 budgeted this year. It’s a significant amount of money. My question is related to something that I read in the newspaper where the Nunavut Film Commission were not getting the money out to the applicants under their program or in sufficient time to be of any benefit to the applicant.
I am wondering if the minister, or the deputy minister could comment on whether that problem has been addressed and if this money when it’s approved in the main estimates, whether early in the new year the money will get out to good projects so they could make use of it throughout the year, and not get it another eight months later.
What we’ve been doing is that we’re trying to work out something better, or a better way of delivering this program. I do believe that we’ll have a better success in the New Year; how we could deliver this better. Our department, if anything, is concerned that the outside people have a better delivery process for the people that need the money to fund their film.
I think what we are doing is we are going to revisit how we are going to deliver this again. I think that we learned from what could be better from the past.
Can the minister just give us a little bit of background on what the problems were in getting the money out to the producers in the current fiscal year?
I’ll get Ms. Keenainak to respond to that question.
We have been working with the Nunavut Film Commission and the Board. One of the issues was that the programs, themselves, were advertised late in the year; they were announced in January.
Nunavut Film Board has had some operational issues that are currently ongoing, but the department is providing some assistance to them and working with the board to make sure that the funding does go up for this year. Our aim is to make sure that funding programs are advertised a lot earlier in the new fiscal year.
I thank the minister and Ms. Keenainak. It’s very important.
I think this is not the only program where money was delayed; I think it is Strategic Investment Program was late as well. It wasn’t advertised until July. I think the funding got out in September or October, so it was quite late in the fiscal year.
I’m glad to hear that you’re aware of that issue and you’ll work very hard it get it out earlier in the fiscal year than later; I think people can do more earlier than sit around wondering if they can get funded.
Same page, K-9, the Nunavut Economic Development Association, in the past 2004-05 it had $123,000 and then $100,000 last year and now you’re budgeting $100,000 this year. Is there no reason for an increase? They work very closely with economic development officers, so I would expect that they would constantly be going up, but you’re not budgeting any additional fund for it.
Any comment on that Mr. Minister? Thank you Mr. Chairman.
The department provides core funding to a need of $100,000, and what happened this fiscal year is that they accessed some additional funding from the department and that’s why it’s showing a little bit more, but the core amount that we provided was $100,000.
Thank you Ms. Keenainak.
And on page K-10, contributions to business development, there’s $100,000 decrease over the last year, a decrease from $850,000 to $750,000. Could you explain why there is a decrease?
What had happened last year is, this fiscal year, there was an agreement with Kivalliq Partners in Development, and part of that agreement was $100,000 provided to them for administration, then the Kivalliq Partners in Development contract was terminated.
That amount has been diverted, and the money has been reallocated to increase the positions in the Kivalliq.
Chairman: Thank you, Ms. Keenainak. Mr. Peterson.
Again, this is one of those situations where I think we are just moving money around.
We had to find money to help economic development, so, contributions to business development is very important if we are going to help our entrepreneurs stimulate the economy. I hope that this doesn’t negatively affect them in terms of some of the projects they want to get off the ground.
On the same page, the Nunavut Development Corporation is budgeted $3,188,000 from your business plan for 2006-07 for the Nunavut Development Corporation. It indicated that there was a requirement of $4,128,000 from the Government of Nunavut.
I’m wondering why, in light of the amount of funding that they require, why you’re not increasing the level from $3,188,000?
We just don’t have the money to...we just don’t have the flexibility to increase our budget again. It’s always good to get more money to the corporations so they can run better, and again it’s lack of the funding that we have that’s not flexible any at moving any money from other programs that we have to put into in NDC.
Could the minister tell us, for the record, how many part-time, seasonal, or full-time jobs are created by our investment to the Nunavut Development Corporation in these businesses in the various communities in Nunavut?
Just to remind you’ve got 22 seconds.
They have 145 full-time employees, in community-based businesses, and I can get back to you, my colleague, with the part-time positions.
All I have is the full-time ones, so, 145 full-time employees.
In the minister’s opinion, are our investments in the Nunavut Dev Corp and their subsidiaries a good investment in Nunavut?
I just remind you to refrain from asking questions seeking an opinion, but Mr. Minister, do you have comments on that question?
I think that is a policy question.
I think I would have to look into that and get back to my colleague to get a better answer on that.
I thank the minister. I apologize for asking a hypothetical or opinion question.
I’ll ask a more specific question.
How many subsidiary companies does the Nunavut Development Corporation in Nunavut operate?
Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Peterson for that question.
I’ll just remind you your time is up, so thank you for your questions.
We have nine subsidiary companies.
Next, we have Mr. Mapsalak, but before I recognize Mr. Mapsalak, I’ll just remind you to please refer to the page numbers. You’ll be asking questions on K-6, and the six following thereafter.
My colleague has already asked the question that I was going to bring up. I have a question on Contributions to Business Development.
I did get the answer that I wanted, but for further clarification I would like to know why there is a reduction from $850,000 to $750,000? Is the whole amount utilized each year?
As of January 20, 2006, there has been approximately $670,000 that has been utilized from this pot in the Keewatin, Baffin, and Kitikmeot.
How much does each region get, or does each community allocate the amount? Or, are they divvied up on an equal basis?
As I stated earlier, $563,000 was utilized by January 20, 2006, and that was out of the $850,000.
For the Kitikmeot, $225,000; Keewatin, $225,000; and Baffin gets $300,000.
It’s up to the communities to make proposals and get the funding from these amounts.
When people apply for funding, do you have a cap for individual applications? If you do have a cap for individual applications what is your cap limit for applications?
I should have stated earlier that that’s a nice haircut.
It varies between the regions because the application figures vary.
If they apply for a certain thing, there is a limit because we are able to provide different figures for applicants that apply from this funding.
Mr. Mapsalak: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. (interpretation ends) Permanent business development fund can grant to small business. (interpretation) So is that the one that has a $5,000 cap on grants for small businesses?
The smallest one is $5,000 for grants to small business.
They are able to get another additional $5,000 for core funding but starting from this $5,000 up to $150,000 that you can apply for.
The last paragraph on page K-10, the one time contribution for 2004-05, there was only $134,000. What was that line item used for?
How come you don’t have any funding for this line item now?
Hon. Olayuk Akesuk: Mr. Chairman. Can I have Ms. Keenainak answer that question?
Chairman: Most definitely, Mr. Minister. Ms. Keenainak.
If I can remember, last year, we reviewed the actual expenditures in regards to the Nanisivik and Polaris Mine. Also, there’s a gemstone deposit that was found. That’s what it was used for, this one-time contribution.
Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Mapsalak for your questions.
I have a question mainly on K-5, but I do have another question on the same page.
In the business plan you had identified $673,000 for this fiscal year for private business assistance.
But in the department’s 2005-06 estimates, it seems like the figure is finally adequate, and I’m glad to see that it is finally settled down.
The question that I have; it’s evident that the hamlets now have to spend money to get funding from CIP and they get someone to work and also ask the small businesses to do some work for them. There is nothing in detail in the funds that could be set aside as a contingency fund.
Also, they now have to use the NNI so they’ll have to pay on top of what they already pay.
Has the minister considered providing additional funding for municipalities to administer the NNI Policy?
Just a minute, we’re looking for the page. Sorry, Mr. Chairman.
We have wanted to review the municipalities and also CEDOs, and how we can deal with this issue. Also, along with our SAOs and finance officers, we provided the municipalities with information on the NNI Policy.
Since this year, we now have a secretariat within our office. It’s evident that it’s going to benefit the municipalities to make sure that NNI is administered properly.
Yes, it’s true that the NNI Secretariat, I’m sure that municipalities are going to ask questions over there.
And I’m very glad because the municipalities don’t even know where to go, and when they have to pay additional funds for NNI on some projects, like the Community Initiatives Program, they do create employment.
Once you identify it had some funding, or if you had to use additional funding by trying to abide by the NNI Policy in your estimates, which line item do you have for the budget, just in case you needed to get additional funds for administering the NNI Policy?
Yes, in the beginning, when the secretariat has been running, and once we find out how much additional funding we need, we’ll need to review it to find out where we can find some additional funds if we require additional funds because at this time we don’t know how much money we will spend under this.