Bob McLeod

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...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. At this stage most of the money that would be spent would be for planning and it would increase as we go forward. There are still some aspects of the project that would have to be worked out. The delegation that included MLA Bromley, I felt that the potential was there, the technology was there that could be used in the Northwest Territories. I guess a part of that that still has to be worked out is the Deline delegation was interested in taking over or becoming the builders and also having the rights to the technology in the Northwest Territories. That is kind of a...

We’re always looking to reduce red tape at every opportunity. We have gone a long ways with regard to licensing of tourism operators and so on. We’ve reduced some of the requirements. On the business side it’s not as easy as it sounds. We just have to look at some of the Auditor General reports and they put pretty onerous reporting requirements on ourselves so that a lot of the paperwork that we require is something that we believe we have to follow proper accounting procedures and certainly the Auditor General comments very quickly if we seem not to be complying. Also we have to be vigilant...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That’s because of the 20/20 money and also money for collective bargaining. There are three collective bargaining negotiations that we’re getting ready for. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chairman, we have six members right now. I believe that is our plan to keep it at that for the next while because of the fact that the NEB report indicated that proponents are to give an update in 2013. Our expectation is we will probably keep it at that for a year or so. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.