Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This government has chosen to pursue a focus on helping people lift themselves out of poverty. Unfortunately, the welfare-based system we now have in place has proven unsuccessful. It is complex, intrusive and inefficient and administration is too costly. Not enough dollars are getting through to the people who need them. Instead they are chewed up by an increasingly expensive bureaucracy. Positive outcomes are few and far between and the cycle of poverty deepens.

Economists of all political stripes, both right and left, agree that a better and more effective tool is the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I also would like to follow up my Member’s statement with questions for the Minister of ITI.

If it was not apparent to the Minister before today that there is a significant public concern surrounding fracking in the NWT, it should be clear now, and the public wants input on the question of whether to fracture or not, and that the drafting of fracking regulations is premature. It puts the cart before the horse.

Will the Minister now declare a moratorium on horizontal hydraulic fracturing in the Northwest Territories until a comprehensive public review of the practice is...

Abandoning already stranded fossil fuels and quickly positioning ourselves to take advantage of renewable opportunities is the obvious and compulsory answer. We have the chance to be there to meet the renewable energy puck and slap it into the net. Will we hear the crowd roar? We can if we so choose on behalf of our people and our land. I certainly hope we do. Mahsi.

Just a quick follow-up there. How long is this monitoring supposed to go on? Is this sort of an interim report, I gather, from what I’ve heard so far, and when will we see the final results on the testing of these new road construction techniques to protect permafrost? Thank you.

Thank you for that. Just on the Inuvik one, I thought we had repaired that last summer. Did it reopen up in the same area, or is this another area of the airstrip? Is this directly related to the first one? Does it make it a larger issue? I just have to get some context on that. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I did want to follow up there. So, the $3 million is for the Yellowknife Airport and the $1.6 million for Inuvik Airport runway repair are both carried over, so these are issues that have been ongoing. Can I just find out if these are loss of permafrost-type things that are going on?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to present a petition dealing with the matter of a fracking moratorium pending a comprehensive regional review.

The petition contains 1,142 signatures of Northwest Territories residents and the petitioners request that the Government of the Northwest Territories put a moratorium on horizontal hydraulic fracturing until a comprehensive, transparent and public review of the cumulative environmental, social and economic risks and benefits of the process is completed under Part 5.1 of the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the NWT public clearly...

It’s of great concern if the Minister hasn’t seen the science on climate change. I think everybody in the world should see it, but probably not nearly as much as this Minister should.

Would the Minister commit to becoming intimately familiar with the scientific conclusions on climate change? Mahsi.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I also support our goals and vision totally. We are now talking about the interpretation of those. I would note that clearly, for a million dollars of investment, the jobs are there for renewable energy far and beyond, half an order of magnitude beyond oil and gas.

We are fortunate in having alternatives to fossil fuel extraction and its form of tremendous renewable energy options in every community. The technology is here now and getting better by the day. The United States is planning a complete switch to renewable energy in the next 30 years.

My question: What...

I take it that’s a no to the moratorium. We all know that the people called for a halt to economic analysis of the last application, yet the government approved it, despite having the power to call for that environmental review.

Of more than 400 peer reviewed publications on the impacts of shale gas development, 75 percent of which we published in 2013, 96 percent indicate adverse health outcomes, 92 percent indicate elevated air pollution and 73 percent warn of water pollution because of fracking. Tight oil fracking starts after that, so the research is behind, but it’s coming out completely...