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.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wouldn’t think we’re misleading anybody. We are looking at a plan. We are looking at options and we have excess power. We are working on a business case. If the business case presents that it’s feasible to export power after we’ve looked at the northern demands first, then it’s something that we are looking at.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. On my right I have Mr. Dave Heffernen, chief information officer for the Government of the Northwest Territories. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for those comments. I agree with regard to our infrastructure. We should give ourselves an award in some cases. I think this is something that’s been around for a while, being held to a higher standard when we build buildings and other infrastructure. We would be very pleased to take the advice of the committee and find ways to be less grand while still fulfilling all of the Building Code requirements, safety standards and so on.

Most of our buildings, we amortize them over 40 years but most of them last longer than that. I think that the list of projects...

Thank you for those comments. I appreciate your perseverance. I think that the items in the budget, certainly Fort Simpson and I know the Trout Lake Airport has been worked on for some time. The Trout Lake School, as you know, there’s some planning money for it. The chipseal, obviously we wouldn’t want to see all that fine chipseal disappear, and we’ll talk to the department about that. I think we have some money for Highway No. 1. We were talking to industry about more investment in that area.

In the longer term, in talking with the federal government, they are very interested in what we’re...

Thank you, Madam Chair. With me I have Michael Aumond, deputy minister of Finance. Thank you, Madam Chair.

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 think we all aspire to that. We are obviously limited by the level of resources. We try to do the best we can for every community. I should point out that in our capital needs assessment, Colville Lake has been identified in there, that there will be some planning studies that will be done to make sure that the needs of Colville Lake are eventually addressed. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

With the myriad of programs and services that we deliver, generally we take into account a number of different features. For example, population is a very important component of any program delivery. For example, Education, they tried to tie their funding to the number of students, parent/student ratios. The Department of Health has a compendium of care, and depending on the population, if we have very small communities we can’t always have a nurse in every community. Some programs are tied to each other. Generally we don’t send nurses where there are no RCMP officers. Those kinds of things.

We...