Floyd Roland

Thank you, Madam Chair…Madam Speaker, sorry about that. It’s been a long day. I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Weledeh, that Bill 2, Supplementary Appropriation Act, No. 4, 2004-2005, be read for the third time. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Yellowknife South, that Bill 2, Supplementary Appropriation Act, No. 4, 2004-2005, be read for the first time.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I guess since we are going into a little bit of history here, maybe I should do some of my own. Becoming the Minister responsible for this area and being briefed on the files that we had and the guarantees we had in place, I made a decision to bring this forward to my FMB colleagues and recommended that we act on these. The Arslanian factory deal was reached with the existing shareholders there as they managed to redo their work and come back to us with a better business plan and a more secure position for ourselves as the GNWT, and we accepted that...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, there is one way of looking at this. If we say we are going to take a percentage of this or take all the revenue that would come back to general revenues, which is used for programs and services delivered by Health and Social Services and the sales decline and the money starts to drop, what do we do then? The way we do it now is the Department of Health and Social services would come forward with a request for funding and ask for increases if they have new programs and services they want to deliver or enhance existing ones. With that, we would review...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, ITI is the department that is directly involved with the polishing itself, on setting up the 10 percent allocation for companies in the North. Maybe the Minister would have that information of who is actually being able to draw down on that 10 percent. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, the Liquor Commission has the revolving fund. That fund is paid back into the GNWT general revenue and used for programming throughout the Northwest Territories. So in a sense, it already comes back to the government and is used for programs. It is not specifically targeted, but it comes back to the government and we use that money to help run programs and services. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, you're correct that that is not included in this process as it has not been calculated. That was a different action taken by a different department, so we don't have that information available today. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, when you look at the total proceeds outside of the estimates fees we had received for the polar bear trademark, up front dealing with the number, we're about $4.5 million.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, yes, when you add this amount that we're accounting for through the supplementary appropriation to the initial amount that was recorded, we're totalling a $6.5 million loss to the GNWT. Thank you.

Yes, I wish to.