EdinburghNLP/nunavut-hansard-plusplus huggingface dataset:
Before we proceed, I would like to remind members of the following: according to Rule 77(1), you have 10 minutes to speak, and according to Rule 77(2), subject to the discretion of the Chair, a member may speak more than once to the matter under discretion but not until every member wishing to speak has spoken.
I would like to make several observations from the minister’s opening comments, especially on page one in the middle paragraph that he stated that, “…Disabled Persons Preventative Maintenance Program and the Homeownership Programs remain at approximately the same level as last year.”
Is it because the demand is less this time than last year?
Another comment that I would like to make is on the second page of his opening remarks that “Construction on the housing units where materials were ordered and delivered in the fall of 2006 will be largely completed by December.”
We are doing capital estimates for 2008-09. Why didn’t he mention that the construction of the housing units is for 2007?
Why did he skip the 2007 about its ordering and delivering of these public housing units?
In his opening remarks, with the problems we had, especially the chairman of the standing committee’s comments about delivery problems this year that very little is talked about in our capital planning process of how we are going to answer these questions or problems.
I will be asking along the lines of these questions at the appropriate time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Arvaluk. Members, comments?
I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the minister and his officials here to the Chambers in the Committee of the Whole.
Mr. Chairman, I know that one of the biggest issues that we face in Nunavut is housing, and that leads to a lot of other issues out there. Another big issue that the government, and certain departments in the government have, is staffing. A lot of that is related to housing as well.
You hear a lot of whining about the increases to the staff housing rents and there is mention of more staff housing here.
The chairman mentioned the review that’s being done on that.
I look forward to seeing that and asking if we’re losing people because of staff housing costs, why we are building more units. Do we need to be building more units if it’s not working? Have they thought of looking at different options or approaches in that area?
So I look forward to asking questions on that and hear responses from the minister.
I, too, would like to applaud the department for the increased Energy Efficiency Program that they have there for adding additional funding for that program. I know that with the increasing costs of electricity and the cost of fuel, that it’s drawn on top of the increasing rents and the markets for housing is quite high, so it costs a lot; it’s not cheap to buy a house, especially here in Iqaluit.
Those other costs are also passed onto the retailers. They’re not going to drop their bottom line.
They’re going to increase their costs. So the complete spectrum of the cost of living goes up on a regular basis whenever there’s an increase in those costs.
I look forward to asking the minister on the status of how the units that are proposed to be built here in Iqaluit and the status on those units as well.
I’ll save the rest of my comments and questions when we get to the appropriate section.
Any more members for comments?
Mr. Curley: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. What I would just like to add with respect to opening comments, I would like to advise the minister, through my opening comments, that I think it’s really quite serious and important that the minister be transparent with the way in which the housing delivery is administered.
We have good faith in the Members of the Assembly, and to the president and the officials, we have granted you the authority to manage the construction of units from the last capital request that were made last year to this construction season currently.
I’m disappointed to say that the minister is not transparent with his opening remarks about the problems that are now associated with the delivery, as well as the procurement and packaging issues. It’s not going to go away, Mr. Chairman. I believe the minister or the president should really account for those.
We were given to believe that when the contract for delivery, procurement and packaging, which were issues last year, that there would be considerable savings. I will be asking you to explain exactly what you meant.
There are some views that there were going to be more than $2 million and someone told me today that there would have been $5 million worth of savings.
To go through this new approach, was that information accurate, or was it misleading?
Mr. Chairman, I flip through these kinds of official statements at face value and that we don’t fool around with those statements, and we don’t want to be misled by these statements.  And if someone did provide misleading information, they should account for their responsibilities for inaccurate information because I’m not sure that the new approach has resulted whatsoever in costs savings.
So someone will have to explain these to us and I believe these considerable expenditures, for having to maybe ship all the material that are now sitting in Montreal to be airlifted, is not going to be a cost benefit at all to Nunavummiut.
We will now proceed to the page-by-page review of the departmental estimates starting with page L-6.
Grants and Contributions. Headquarters Region.
Mr. Curley: Further to a part of my opening comments that I made officially as chairman of the standing committee, so no personal comments, I would like the minister to indicate to us what costs savings, when he announced exactly to a press release or interviews by his officials, have been made with respect to the new procurement as well as the packaging and distribution contracts.
Can the minister clearly and transparently explain exactly how that new contracting arrangement that he announced last spring has resulted in the success for this current shipping and construction season?
We saved $6 million in that area.
That’s actually significantly larger savings than was first presented by the media or that some officials circulated.
I would like to ask the minister, whether or not this particular savings, that he alluded to, with respect to new contracting arrangements or the procurement, as well as the distribution packaging, is officially contained in any repor,t or whether it’s just an estimate of the so-called savings that the GN’s Housing Corporation hopes to make.
Yes, we try to give the exact figure. Maybe there are times that we might be off but we try to abide by the figures that we give. Yes, the $6 million is true.
I certainly hope that the minister is providing us accurate information.
In my way of justifying explanations to cost expenditures that have not yet been completed, I fail to be completely convinced by the minister of what he is saying is accurate, because how can you actually say there were cost savings for something that is a complete disaster right now, and then you have the materials that have been shipped by suppliers have not met the criteria and the conditions of the contract that you issued last spring?
It may be funny but it’s deadly serious to us. How can you actually say there are cost savings when some of the materials have been shipped back to the supplier because there was no space at the 20,000 square feet facility that your contractor provided, because there’s no room for them to entertain it?
The minister should explain to the committee because I think you have mismanaged your Housing Corporation budget and we have yet to see whether or not there would be any cost savings if you have to now charter and airlift all that material, according to the press information that we read, 45 truckloads of material, perhaps even more now, sitting in Montreal.
The materials that were supposed to make it to Nunavut, perhaps there are approximately 7,000 metric tonnes and there are approximately 125 metric tonnes that are still down there where they ship material.
We wanted to use the funds properly. We have prepared the Nunavut Delivery Strategy to see how we can cost save when we are constructing 725 units in Nunavut. We have also considered how we can increase the number of units.
We tried to cost save during the time when we started dealing with it, and as I stated, that $6 million is an actual fact that we have saved money on. We’re still working on it.
And the issue that you just brought up, Nunavut has to understand that we’re still working on the 7,000 metric tonnes in Nunavut.
We are still doing inventory on this but I cannot give you the figure right now as to how much we will be expending.
As the member stated, we have to be honest and I do not want to tell a lie.
We want to deliver all this material to the communities and we will continually work on this issue to make sure that Nunavummiut understand.
We wrote a letter to the Members of the Legislative Assembly and we had a press release for Nunavut. We released that information trying to be as honest as possible. I don’t want to tell a lie to the people of Nunavut and that’s not what I was elected for.
We will work very hard to deal with this properly.
This $200 million cost savings will be used to build units to benefit Nunavut people.
So even though we experienced this delivery problem, we will still deliver the 725 units according to the original plan.
Mr. Curley (interpretation): Mr. Chairman, I did not say that you were telling a lie, what I said was the figures that were mentioned could be misleading.
Even before the cost saving per year was completed, you estimated that $6 million.
You cannot give an exact amount before it’s spent. This big mess is not completed yet.
I know that you have been told that there’s going to be $6 million in cost savings because you now have to airlift all of the material.
I don’t think that’s a true figure. It’s going to be more expensive to deliver and use, and yet, you say there will be savings. I don’t believe you have been given the proper support and I’m pretty sure that there could even be a lawsuit.
For that reason, if this delivery was done properly, then we would save money.
We don’t know which communities didn’t receive their material by sealift.
The information you provided us yesterday or today states that the construction has started in some communities but it doesn’t say how much material units are still missing.
Our correspondence is not responded to yet and the standing committee’s request for detailed information said that you have been evasive.
I have said that they are still under review and we don’t want to give out information that is incomplete.
I want to provide adequate information to the members as to which communities have not received their materials.
So therefore, I cannot provide you with that information because it is incomplete. We’re still doing inventory.
Once that is complete and the information is available, and I’m sure that other communities have received their materials but we have to deal with the other communities on what kind of materials didn’t make it to their community and what kind of materials or parts are not in their community.
We need to find out and we have not completely reviewed this. So therefore, I cannot provide you with that information until everything has been completed.
I will provide correspondence explaining that because there are quite a few communities.  Once we do all of the proper writing of what’s missing in the communities, then I will provide that to the members.
Mr. Curley (interpretation): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Minister. I know that you’re trying to say understandable words.
I was told for many years that those are experienced transport companies.
I was told today that the distribution and packaging contractors probably don’t know.
We have to get the information from them but I don’t think they have experience with that.
Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask the minister: if we’re going to have cost savings with contracting of the packaging and distribution, the marshalling contract, you can get that information to find out, why did you say that the delivery went well and now, you have to tender again?
That same tender closed on Friday.
I’ll get Mr. Scott to respond to that, as you know I haven’t been in my office until late this morning.
So I’ll get Mr. Scott to respond to that.
Thank you, Mr. Curley, for your very good questions.
I would like to provide a little bit more information to the member as well.
The estimate of savings that we feel we could have achieved through changing the way we procured the material was based on a comparison of material costs this year versus our material costs from last year.
Now, part of the difficulty in coming up on an exact number is that last year’s material costing included marshalling and freight and we have to strip those numbers out of the numbers in order to do a proper comparison of the two. If all things had gone well with the marshalling company with the marshalling contract, then those are the savings that we would have achieved and we would have been able to deliver additional units from the Housing Trust.
Obviously, the difficulties with the marshalling and the materials that were left behind, and other issues with the marshaller, are going to erode those savings. But at this point, our estimates certainly would not exceed where, right now, our expected savings are.
We have never indicated that we are going to be flying all of this material in at once. Part of the delay is trying to organize to ensure that we are utilizing the most efficient way of getting this missing material to the communities that need it. That will include, yes, we would be flying some materials in as soon as possible, and some of them may have left the new marshalling yard today to go into the communities that are most advanced in their construction for this fall.
Other materials may wait until spring, when we do the spring startup on some of our construction sites.
Some of those may have to be flown in as well, but also, a lot of the material, if we organize and coordinate it, may be able to wait until the first sealift that comes in next summer. There would be some additional savings on there as well with what we’re, right now, expecting to be additional costs.
The 125 metric tonnes of material down there, we could take them, it’s roughly six Hercules loads, drop them off into all the affected communities, which is the majority of communities in Nunavut, at a price tag of about $900,000.
So that would possibly be the worst case scenario.  We’re trying to manage those materials down there as best as possible to ensure that we mitigate our potential losses or additional expenses.
I’ll leave it at that and hopefully, that will satisfy Mr. Curley.
Chairman (Mr. Arreak): Thank you, Mr. Scott. Mr. Curley.
Mr. Curley (interpretation): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. (interpretation ends) There are a number of concerns that we have as a standing committee, as the minister quite well knows, and I appreciate the response coming in from the Housing Corporation President.
I think there was a question that was not answered and I would like a clear answer.
First of all, I think the members should understand clearly why the distribution, procurement, and packaging, in the end, is no longer just marshalling. The suppliers are no longer responsible with packaging any amount of drywall that you buy from. They are just going to distribute it to the facility in Montreal.
That’s the way I understand it.
Maybe you could explain to us: why was this particular approach used? It appears that your new process that you entered into since last spring is not working out.
So why do you have to re-tender now, even before the year is over?
Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Curley. Mr. Scott.
After the results of last year’s material tender came in, the additional cost from that tender - the additional cost for materials, marshalling, and freight - was the main reason why we dropped the number of units we felt we could deliver from 800 units to 725 units.
Originally, when the money was announced, we anticipated being able to deliver 800 housing units until we received the material prices from last year’s material tender.
We realized at that point that that’s only if we continue to do business and prepare materials the same way we always have, those costs are going to continue to rise.
So we needed to look at different, or new, or innovative approaches in order to try to get a handle on the rising costs.
One of the things that we did besides separating the marshalling and crating from the contracts was we split our material requirements into five commodity items; there were five tenders as opposed to one large tender.
In addition to the marshalling being separate, we also looked at containerizing a lot of our materials, as opposed to the traditional way of crating all of the material at an additional cost.
So the savings that we are anticipating are as a result of better prices from suppliers because the tender was broken out into several different components, and also that we use and we’re looking at different methods of packaging the materials.
I believe that might answer most of Mr. Curley’s questions but I’m not sure.
Hon. Olayuk Akesuk: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. (interpretation) It was quite some time ago that we received that $200 million.  We were asked by the standing committee to look at cost saving measures because it’s very expensive to send the material by ship.
That was the direction that was given to us by the standing committee and we were asked to look at different options. So this is what we did: we followed the advice of the standing committee and to look at cost saving measures when we were looking at packaging and sending the material up to Nunavut.
That was the direction that was given to us by the standing committee and that’s what we tried to do. We could do another review to see where we can save more money.
Mr. Curley: I appreciate the response coming in.
I’m not going to argue with the minister. I want to deal with the actuals.
The tender, obviously, was issued last year for marshalling, as well as requesting the supplier to make new arrangements, but the minister or his officials of the Housing Corporation doesn’t appear to take the experience as a value.
You hired people that had no experience whatsoever, and therefore, you are trying to convince this committee that you actually are going to have substantial savings and you have not.
You have demonstrated that the fact is that there is a big mess.
The people that I spoke to, acting surprised, told me that, and they have told you since last May they said that you guys are getting into huge trouble. You guys have to shape up. None of your officials take them seriously, so they end up speaking to CGS.
At least they had a person willing to listen. That information was provided to CGS because they felt, then, that only the public official can convince the Housing Corporation officials of the big mess they are getting into and they’re downplaying this serious problem.
Only the Auditor General, I believe, is going to get that information to clearly, I think, express whether or not you have proper financial savings.
You cannot save any money. The distribution agency that you hired is billing you for hot air, when there is a volume with nothing in it, where previously, the other contractor used to fill up the volume that is empty with other things. There’s no way that I believe that you are going to convince us.
So therefore, in view of time, I move that we report progress as this will continue for tomorrow and so on. Thank you.
Chairman (Mr. Evyagotailak): Thank you, Mr. Curley.
We have a motion on the floor to report progress. The motion is not debatable.
Speaker (interpretation): Colleagues, going to the Orders of the Day. Item 20.
Speaker (interpretation): Thank you. There is a motion on the floor. Is there a seconder?
Thank you, Member for Rankin North, Mr. Curley.
A reminder of a meeting of the Standing Committee of Government Operations and Accountability at nine o’clock tomorrow morning in the Tuktu Boardroom.
Orders of the Day for October 30:
Bill18
This House stands adjourned until Tuesday, October 30, at 1:30 p.m.
>>House adjourned at 18:03
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Pages 2071 – 2136
Opening Prayer 2071
Ministers’ Statements 2071
Members’ Statements 2073
Oral Questions 2075
Reports of Standing and Special Committees 2095
Tabling of Documents 2096
Notices of Motions 2097
Motions 2097
Second Reading of Bills 2098
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters 2100
Report of the Committee of the Whole 2134
Orders of the Day 2135
Tuesday, October 30, 2007 2071
098 – 2(4): Qanuippitali – Inuit Health Survey (Aglukkaq) 2071
099 – 2(4): Mineral Exploration and Mining Update (Simailak) 2072
100 – 2(4): Ikummatiit, an Energy Strategy for Nunavut (Picco) 2073
219 – 2(4): Cape Dorset Co-op Recognition (Akesuk) 2073
220 – 2(4): Poor Condition at Kugluktuk School (Evyagotailak) 2074
275 – 2(4): Cost of Recruitment and Retention Strategy (Tootoo) 2075
276 – 2(4): Power Outage in Repulse Bay (Mapsalak) 2076
277 – 2(4): The Use and Mis-use of Medication (Peterson) 2079
278 – 2(4): Bills Based on Estimates (Curley) 2081
279 – 2(4): Gasoline Subsidies to Communities (Kattuk) 2084
280 – 2(4): Recruitment and Retention of Government of Nunavut Employees (Tootoo) 2085
281 – 2(4): Table Consultant’s Report on NDC (Curley) 2088
282 – 2(4): Hedging Policy Used in 2007 Resupply (Peterson) 2090
283 – 2(4): Recruitment & Retention Strategy FMB Proposal (Tootoo) 2092
284 – 2(4): FMB Submission for Recruitment and Retention Strategy (Tootoo) 2093
Committee Report 001 – 2(4): Interim Report on Review of Bills 6, Official Languages Act and Bill 7, Inuit Language Protection Act (Mapsalak) 2095
131 – 2(4): Letter from the Minister of Finance re. Alcohol Education Committees (Peterson) 2096
132 – 2(4): Standing Committee Ajauqtiit on Bill 6, Official Languages Act and Bill 7, Inuit Language Protection Act – Written Submissions, October 2007 (Mapsalak) 2096
133 – 2(4): Kugluktuk School – Photographs of Deteriorating Condition (Evyagotailak) 2096
134 – 2(4): Ikummatiit – Government of Nunavut’s Energy Strategy – September 2007 (Picco) 2097
020 – 2(4): Extension of Review Period for Bills 6 and 7 – Notice (Mapsalak) 2097
020 – 2(4): Extension of Review Period for Bills 6 and 7 (Mapsalak) 2098
Bill 18 – An Act to Amend the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act and Related Statutes – Second Reading 2098
Bill 19 – An Act to Amend the Income Tax Act, No. 2 – Second Reading 2099
Bill 16 – Appropriation (Capital) Act, 2008-2009 – Consideration in Committee – Nunavut Housing Corporation 2100
Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, Honourable Olayuk Akesuk, Mr. James Arreak, Honourable Levinia Brown, Mr. Tagak Curley, Mr. Joe Allen Evyagotailak, Mr. Peter Kattuk, Mr. Steve Mapsalak, Honourable Patterk Netser, Honourable Paul Okalik, Mr. Keith Peterson, Honourable Edward Picco, Honourable David Simailak, Honourable Louis Tapardjuk, Mr. Hunter Tootoo.
Speaker (Hon. James Arreak)(interpretation): Good afternoon. I would like to ask Mr. Curley to say the opening prayer.
Good afternoon, Premier, Ministers, and Members.
Minister’s Statement 098 – 2(4): Qanuippitali – Inuit Health Survey (Aglukkaq)
Hon. Leona Aglukkaq: Good afternoon, everyone.
Qanuippitali the Inuit Health Survey took place from August to September in 18 coastal communities in the Baffin and Kivalliq regions this summer.
It is the first comprehensive look at the health of Inuit in Nunavut. This project will leave a legacy for the future. It provides us with information on the health and wellness of our children, adults and our communities.
Mr. Speaker, the health survey work on the Coast Guard ship Amundsen, has been completed for 2007 with nearly 1,200 individuals participating.
This study is unique and incorporates and respects Inuit Qaujamajatugangit. It is also conducted with the utmost confidentiality of participants.
Mr. Speaker, the steering committee of the project includes members of the Department of Health and Social Services, who have been acting as co-principal investigators.