Bob McLeod

I don’t follow his logic, but I’m not surprised that he’s not supportive of developing hydro, which is a very clean renewable resource. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I speak to them all the time. I speak to the Minister responsible for the NWT Power Corporation all the time, and we are all working on developing a business case. We’re also developing the technical information to back it up.

I don’t have any opening comments, Mr. Chair. If we can just get right into it.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to bring in a witness, with your approval.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. With regard to the comments of the Member with regard to Aurora College, funds have been identified for ’15 and ’16 to do some planning on what this expanded role for Aurora College could be.

Another priority for our capital formula: Are we failing our people? We are always open to changing the process for the rating of projects, and certainly if that’s a recommendation coming from committee, I’m sure the government will be pleased to address that.

On Mildred Hall, the Department of Education has identified a need for renos to enhance the life of the assets and they are...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I thank the Member for his comments. As we all know, the draft capital budget was presented to Members back in June of this year, so it was early in the process.

There have been a number of briefings on how the capital budget process actually works. We have a formula where all of the projects are run through and they’re ranked on a priority basis. Based on the amount of money that’s available, the highest priority projects are funded on that basis. For every project, there are five criteria that are used. One is the safety of people, the safety of assets, the environment...

Yes, I would, Madam Chair.

That’s what we’re doing, is developing a business case. I expect that would be somewhere in the order of 500 to 700 million dollars. It would all depend on whether there’s a business case or not.

For example, in education we have the same level of curriculum for all of the communities. Again, it’s affected by population and the number of students. With health, we have a similar level of care. The health boards provide for health professionals to travel to communities on a regular basis in how they deal with health care. There are also certain standards in terms of placement of nurses and other health professionals.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As a government we live in a very large territory and there are a lot of regional, geographical and environmental differences. We try to maintain standards so that we have some consistent delivery of programs, but we recognize that not every region is going to be exactly the same. We try to maintain certain standards and we try to deliver the same level of programs and services, but it’s not always achievable.