Bob McLeod

Certainly the low water and prohibitive cost estimates for building transmission lines, we don’t know if this low water will continue. This is a first time ever, the lowest in 65 years. Generally, the hydro reservoirs are filled with water every year with the runoff from the spring, or the freshet as they call it. The annual rainfall this year for the three months of May, June, July, I think we had a thimbleful of rain. So I don’t know if this will be continuing on an ongoing basis, but certainly it made us recognize that we had to find a better way to reduce our reliance on hydro facilities...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We learned a lot from the first Energy Charrette. We had a very good discussion and the outcomes of that was the Energy Action Plan, where this government invested more resources into reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. We came up with a 20-year vision for power production and basically it looked at joining up the two hydro zones by building transmission lines and also looking to have inter-ties with the South so we could access cheaper power, and as demand grows, we can expand our hydro facilities. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The government already has a Petroleum Products Stabilization Fund and it has a maximum value of $1 million. This Petroleum Products Stabilization Fund is intended to temporarily compensate for differences between the purchased cost and the sale price of petroleum products. There is always a delay between the day when new fuel products are delivered to communities and the date when prices to customers are changed. So, we already have a Stabilization Fund. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The communities that the Member is referring to are those where we resupply once a year, and whatever the price is at that time we pass it on to the consumer. We have a revolving fund, and in a lot of the small communities when the revolving fund is in a surplus position, we reduce the costs, in a lot of cases, by 10 cents a litre. But, generally, we pass the cost on to the consumer. It’s very unusual for the gas prices to go down. Usually they go up. We’re still waiting here in Yellowknife for the gas prices to go down, so I think you’re referring to a temporary spike...

That is our intention, and we hope that through the people who we invite and all the participants that will in fact be the case. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

It was our government’s intention to look at finishing the costing of these transmission lines, and also, at the same time, we had approached the federal government to increase our borrowing limit by $1 billion.

Our costing has determined that the cost of building a transmission line to join the Taltson and Snare Hydro systems are prohibitive and it’s in the neighbourhood of almost 100 percent more than we had originally forecasted. In our view, those costs are too prohibitive to allow us to go ahead.

I think we feel with a second Energy Charrette we have to take a different approach whereby we...

Of course, we can always look at every situation, but generally the market determines the price and we pass the cost on to the consumer. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

In the Northwest Territories we are working on fracking regulations which will reflect best practices of the industry. We’ve also inherited guidelines from the National Energy Board which deals with hydraulic fracking. In the Northwest Territories’ regulatory system, the appropriate land and water board conducts preliminary screening and our government respects the decisions of the land and water boards. Also, we continue to assess how we best use our new authorities in the Northwest Territories.

I’m very confident that when the draft regulations come out, it will be discussed widely and we...

The website update and advertising campaign began on May 20, 2014. It was highlighted in the sessional statement of May 28th. This was followed by a news release on May 29th and a very extensive advertising campaign in northern papers. We are planning to start another round of advertising and it’s scheduled to start in early November. As usual and as always, we work very closely with committee on all of these things.

What was outlined and discussed with committee was that we would put this legislation on the website and at the appropriate time we would gather all of the feedback and issues and concerns that were raised and that we would report back to committee with the intention that where there were areas of concern, we would deal with the specific legislation.

Just to be more specific, there have been 1,709 legislation review website views, 537 of those were on the pages that list the new legislation. Specific sites that were visited were the Oil and Gas Operations Act and the Petroleum Resources Act...