David Ramsay

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As Minister, I have requested that report and hopefully BDIC and the department get that report as soon as possible.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The department will collect revenues from the administration of our petroleum interests in the NWT and these include non-refundable rentals on the Pointed Mountain oil and gas leases held by Lone Pine Resources, issuance fees and fees for services under the Frontier Lands Registration Regulations, for instance, there’s a $250 fee for the issuance of an exploration licence, and rentals due to the Crown for exploration licences as well.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Part of that $150,000 earmarked for looking at LNG around the territory would include items like storage. It would also include looking at the possibility of getting LNG into other communities that have all-weather road access that are currently on diesel in the Northwest Territories, and that’s something that we continue to look at. Thank you.

The uptake has been very good in all regions across the Northwest Territories. For a breakdown of where the contributions have gone, we could get that for the Member, but in our estimation it’s been spread out across the territory and it is accessible by any school in the Northwest Territories.

Yes, we will try to do that in as short order as we can. In the meantime though, we do have opportunities for community members to take part in community hunts and community harvests under the Community Harvester Assistance Program, so if families wanted to get together and coordinate a trip out on the land to pursue traditional activities, there is currently programs and money available for them to do that.

Thank you. Again, it was important to keep the six positions in Hay River. There’s a lot of activity happening in the Sahtu and our anticipation is there will be a tremendous amount more activity happening in the Sahtu this coming summer and again next winter and into the foreseeable future. We’ve put positions into the Sahtu. As a government, as we move forward, we’ve made a commitment to look at decentralization and putting the nine positions for our petroleum office in Inuvik made sense to the government and what our objectives are. Thank you.

One of the things that was also clearly identified through our work on EOS was the fact that we needed to put more of an effort into tourism training and initiatives regarding tourism training, specifically on the hospitality side. Most of us have travelled. I mean, you always remember the great service that you got wherever you’re at. That’s what we want to see more of our operators have, the availability of getting that type of training for their staff, and that’s our effort on this, and again, it comes from the EOS.

Just following up on the Member’s comments on what makes people choose to...

I’ll go to Ms. Schofield for that response, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Our role as a department is to, again, provide legal advice and support to departments. We do have some new enforcement responsibilities. Those will be carried out by other departments. Our role in this was to add five new positions at our legal division and they’re not just the ATIPP position the Member referenced, but we have beefed up our staff complement in the legal division by five positions in anticipation that they will be busier after April 1st. As we go forward, if we need further resources in that area, through the business planning process we could...

Thank you, Madam Chair. For that detail, we’ll go to the deputy minister. Thank you.