Bob Bromley

Much appreciated and I’m sure my passion is a reflection of what I’m hearing.

I’d like to move now to a question that’s come up before and the Minister is aware of this. In terms of the Solar Strategy, NTPC has a standby charge that completely destroys the economic feasibility of solar, unless you own the facility, solar installations that are 10 kilowatts or greater. I know the Minister is aware of this, but are we going to fix that this year? Is that considered to be part of the work plan for this budget? Mahsi.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I did want to cover a couple more areas here. First of all in the area of electronics implementation, electronics recycling implementation planned for this year, it sounds like we have an agreement with Alberta. How is this going to work and what parts of the territory would that cover? Would we start with sort of the large regional centres? Where are we at with this? Was there a fee to recycle, a plan for recycling electronics, or is this an economic proposition that we’ll actually make dollars from this? Thank you.

I’m still not sure I see the numbers there, but it looks like we’ve got quite a reduction in revenue from the last year that we had an actual, which was the year before the current fiscal year. We are just about at the end of this fiscal year and a revised estimate of $450,000… I will leave it at that so we can move on. It seems curious. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I see a drop there of a couple hundred thousand dollars in the Environment Fund net revenue. Perhaps the money has been put into the e-waste program or something. Could I get an explanation why the drop in revenue there?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Has there been a community or location chosen yet for the smart grid part of that, do we know?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thanks to the Minister. I also did speak to the CEO and he expressed extreme frustration with the department. I am sure there are frustrations on both sides. I would ask the Minister to direct his staff to get down to it and just getting to it. Will the Minister commit to getting those dollars out the door early in the next fiscal year for early childhood development? Thank you.

That’s all the questions I had.

Thanks for those comments. I remain concerned about the $125,000 that had been allocated for the Family Resource Centre in Ndilo, apparently very recently because it’s year end. Ten of the 12 months have passed when those dollars were finally allocated. I’m concerned about the effectiveness of those dollars that are being spent for the last few weeks. So I’d like to know from the Minister, what is being done to ensure that those dollars are spent effectively, particularly given this situation this year. Mahsi.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to talk a little bit about the Inuvik and Norman Wells situations. I know we’ve supported work to look at biomass solutions. I’ve heard the past mayor interviewed on the radio during the recent emergency in Norman Wells extolling the opportunities of biomass in Norman Wells and the Minister has told me that the long-term feasibility of biomass in Inuvik is good. Right now, I don’t see anything in here that follows up on all of those opportunities. What are we doing to move to those?

We could obviously pursue the liquid natural gas routes and other natural gas routes...