Statements in Debates
We have signed an agreement with the proponents which still stands. There are some appendices that have to still be negotiated, mainly in the area of transportation and health. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. We work very closely with Education, Culture and Employment to promote all artists, whether it’s visual artists or performing artists and I think we’ve been very successful in doing so. Some of the promotions that we’ve done, we’ve continued to support artists, but also I’ve had many accolades from performing artist who have accessed funding through the SEED program so that they can go out to different festivals. Some of them even go to storytelling festivals in Hawaii and so on.
In addition to that, we also maintain an NWT artists database. We have an NWT Arts Branding...
Thank you, Mr. Chair. On the previous page the $225,000 was for the NWT Fishermen’s Federation, which is made up of a consortium of fishers that fish on Great Slave Lake. The $550,000 is we want to promote and develop local markets for not only fish but also country food. For example, fish in Great Slave Lake, we’d like to see it served in the hospitals, we’d like to see it served in corrections facilities and also made available for consumption by people, because we think fish is a very healthy food. So if we can distribute and sell it locally rather than shipping it to Winnipeg for sale...
All of the information that we collect is in the public domain. It is not only the remote sensing or the geomatics or the work that we do on behalf of the federal government for NTGO, it’s all available. I guess the problem we have is that unless somebody asks for some specific information, we have so much information that we wouldn’t know how to accumulate it unless somebody was specific in what they were requesting. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Well, first of all, these changes are regulated by the Public Utilities Board so they’ll be monitoring the impacts of the changes. They are working under guidelines that had been set by this government that we communicated to the Public Utilities Board, and we will be making changes to the legislation. As well, as we had indicated with regard to ongoing monitoring of the reduced prices, the reduced commercial rates, that those rate savings are passed on to the customers in the form of lower prices. So we will be working with the Stats Bureau to monitor the cost of goods...
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The memorandum of understanding applies to all government departments and although the list that we have for the Sahtu we feel is deficient because it doesn’t list all of the Sahtu businesses, that is the list that we have. We have been asking for three years to have the list updated but we haven’t had an updated list yet. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We had previously identified $300,000 for the operation of the Socio-economic Advisory Board and we have deferred that until 2012-2013 -- I believe it will show up in one of the pages -- and that is mainly due to scheduling changes and there is no position associated with that at this time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I guess I’ll give you a breakdown of the $4.250 million. Lutselk’e mini-hydro there’s $2.8 million; Whati hydro transmission line, $250,000; Sahtu hydro assessment, $200,000; and expansion of residual heat. The other projects are dependent on funding being made available, but generally the process that we follow is we track our expenditures and we report on a regular basis on our budget for energy priority investments to the coordinating committee and if there are any adjustments to the energy priority investments, it’s approved at that level. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We feel it is an improvement and we will definitely be taking steps to make sure that everybody that we think would be interested would be aware of it.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to comment on some of the general comments that have been made. MLA Krutko, a lot of the comments that he made are exactly what we’re trying to do as a department and as a government to promote small business, develop local economies, promote tourism at the local level, and the tools that we have we’re working very hard to do that with. As a department our main goal when we started the 16th Assembly was that we want to have development in every community, every one of our 33 communities in the Northwest Territories and I think we’re well on our way to getting...