Bob Bromley

I appreciate that offer. That sounds wonderful. The experience in other jurisdictions — and I want to stress that this has been done for millions of households, so this is off the shelf technology. But where it has been done for the first time, typically the utility or some powers that be end up putting barriers in place through, for example, requiring unrealistically expensive meters and so on. I wonder if we can expedite this process by just getting all the players together at the table. I think this is a modus operandi of this government.

Would the Minister be able to facilitate getting...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to follow up on my Member’s statement on the net metering issue. It involves, I believe, the Minister of ENR for renewable energy, the Minister of NTPC, Mr. Roland, and the Minister of PUB, Mr. McLeod. So I don’t have a druthers on who this is directed at, but I’d like to begin by finding out exactly what regulatory process is required to set up net metering for Yellowknife and the Northwest Territories.

Mr. Chair, I move that we rise and report progress.

Mr. Chair, I can’t let this go without commenting once again on what some of the potential savings are by looking at fuel alternatives and transportation alternatives. I realize this one is for the aviation facility. It’s very difficult to avoid for Yellowknife, but it does raise the cost of maintaining tank farms. I just wanted to raise that as something we should be on the watch for. I’m sure the Minister is.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just a quick follow-up on Mr. Hawkins’ questions. Presumably there are years when there is a surplus, when there is what we would call a good fire season. What happens to that surplus, and is there a chance it could be rolled into a fund?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to follow up briefly on that one. I assume there will be other labour contracts that we’ll come upon from time to time, employee contracts. It is my understanding that we might have a couple more supplementary appropriations and obviously very little room now. These are issues that were, of course, raised at our first review of the budget. Decisions were made to decrease concerns about decreasing the supplementary reserve.

I would like to ask the Minister: did we in fact make an error? Should we bump it up to be able to recover these costs? Can we expect this...

I’m hoping that this side of the House will be able to see the results of that exercise too. Is the Minister looking into revenue options that were not in the revenue options paper? Are his officials looking into other options perhaps as a result of the round table? If so, what are they?

Great. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thanks again to the Minister for those comments. Again, I just want to stress that the experience in other jurisdictions is that when they tried to do this sort of thing, they’ve had to go through a long process because of the unreasonable requirements that initially come out of the utilities. It’s just sort of a heads up and an opportunity for us to expedite the system in an efficient way by dealing with that.

Maybe I’ll just ask if the Minister would be willing to at least be aware of that and be keen should the opportunity come up to deal with that issue...

Thanks for those comments. I think that if the Minister were to look into this, the process actually began a number of years before that. I wonder if I could find out exactly where we’re at right now and when we can expect the capability for this operationally to be in place.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are myriad ways we can build our local economies, provide opportunities for jobs in our communities and reduce environmental impacts of energy generation. One effective way is to provide for net metering. This is the chance for residents to generate their own power from renewable energy and to be connected to the power grid so they can contribute power when they have excess and draw power when they need it.

This issue has been before the Public Utilities Board for several years, and the Power Corporation has been asked to provide the option for this service. I...