Bob McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s good to see the amount of interest in establishing an NWT film industry in the Northwest Territories. We have three MLAs that I met with: MLAs Bromley, Abernethy and Hawkins. We’re on schedule. We hired a Yellowknife-based consultant to undertake a review of the film industry and the report is out. We will be doing a review of the report and meeting with the stakeholders sometime in February. We will also have a session with the stakeholders to review the options and I expect to table the report probably in May. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, the Mackenzie Gas Project has the potential to create substantial economic benefits for the people of the Northwest Territories, helping us to make real progress towards this Assembly’s goal of a diversified northern economy providing opportunities and choices for our residents. As Members of this House are aware, we have reached a key milestone in the regulatory review of the project. On December 16, 2010, the National Energy Board released their reasons for a decision on the Mackenzie Gas Project, concluding that the project is in the public interest and should be built. We...

We are in direct communications with Northern Stores and I’ve directed my staff to follow up with Northern Stores, so I hope to be able to share this information with all the Members in the very near future. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We had a very informative trip to Nahanni Butte. Coming back to Yellowknife I had an opportunity to check further into it and upon looking at the electrical bills, we realized that the store had just received their electrical bills and it was quite gratifying to see that after all this work that the bills have finally been reduced significantly. So I expect that we’ll be seeing the impacts of that soon. As well, we will be working very closely with the Stats Bureau to monitor all of the costs.

Of course, when we did meet with the retailers or the people that run the...

As the Minister of Finance has indicated in his budget speech, we will also be tracking it through the Statistics Bureau and I expect we’ll be reporting on a basket of goods on a regular basis. Thank you.

Northern Stores was probably one of the first retailers that we met with to talk about what we could do to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. Northern Stores has indicated that their preference was to find ways to reduce their utilization of energy and also reduce energy costs, and, of course, they said their preference was to have a transparent process so that people could see what they were doing. Northern Stores has spent a lot of time in changing their cooling systems, their freezers, also changing their utilization of lights. We had identified $3 million a year for developing some sort...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m pleased to recognize a constituent of mine from Yellowknife South: Gayla Thunstrom, first vice-president with the Union of Northern Workers, and also I wish her a happy birthday as it is her birthday today. And also Barb Wyness, the public relations and research officer for the Union of Northern Workers.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following document entitled 2009 Public Service Annual Report. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

We do have an existing program, the Sport Outfitter Marketing Program. We do also have other business programs. The majority of those programs are based on viability, so it would be something that probably wouldn’t occur unless they develop alternative tourism products that could be marketed. Depending on our government’s fiscal situation on a go-forward basis, we will continue to try to expand this program. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member has already referenced the Tourism Diversification Marketing Program and I guess for some time we’ve realized that the trends with regard to tourism have been changing and the demand for consumptive tourism has been moving more into the areas of ecotourism and adventure tourism. We developed a marketing program that we spent about $5 million over the past four years so that existing operators can develop new products and look at other opportunities. We have met with the barren-ground outfitters and they said that basically they couldn’t really use that...