Floyd Roland

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I guess one way of looking at this as we talk about what the possibility is, the potential, right now an agreement-in-principle is a base document to begin serious negotiations on what authorities would be drawn from Ottawa, and it’s, if I can, to try to compare it to what we would do, I’ll use the house scenario, for example. Many potential homeowners, as you buy a new house or upgrade, you find you need to do some renovations and make some changes, but you can’t do that until you actually buy the house. In a sense, we’re negotiating this fixed piece of work and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am trying to figure out where that comes from in the sense that the process we are involved in, if we do agree to sign an agreement-in-principle, then we would begin a process of the final settled negotiations, and those negotiations are the questions about what the transition needs to be.

The AIP spells out a timeline right now for the existing structures. We would have to design with our partners, aboriginal governments, how we would then put our stamp and make it a northern process for ourselves. That work would be started as we begin the final set of negotiations...

Mr. Speaker, why is it so important that we proceed at this time? Well, I think there’s a long history of talking about development and grabbing the authority from Ottawa and bring it to the North, and sharing the powers amongst northern governments has been discussed for decades and we’ve come to a place now where, in fact, as I was speaking earlier today, this is not the first occasion that the Government of the Northwest Territories faced a situation of making a decision if we go forward or not. In fact, the 15th Assembly was in a very similar place and had a number of the groups sign on...

As I stated earlier, we have opened the doors to a continued working relationship on this file along with other files where we have continued and shown we’re working in partnership. The Wildlife Act, the Species at Risk Act, the land use plans, the Water Strategy. We’ve had teams going out throughout the Territories and regions to get input and work with us on developing these strategies. This file is the same thing. At the regional leaders table, their technical staff, their lawyers, their negotiators have been part of the process and are welcome to continue to be a part of the process. In...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I must say that I did not hear that interview, at least this morning when I was having my coffee, otherwise I might have burned myself, I guess, in the surprise that a former Premier would wade back into the political arena. I didn’t know that the federal campaign for the Western Arctic had started yet, but maybe that’s the case and he’s priming for that or something. Simply the facts that were there, I guess that’s the danger that we all face. When we leave this place our memories tend to lapse a bit.

The fact is the previous government put in place and signed off an...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ll have to disagree with the Member, and strongly disagree. The fact is we’ve set up the regional leaders table and the regional leaders come to the table, bring the agenda items to the table, and at their request keep it as an agenda item moving forward. The fact is, and if you want to get out and start to put this out there... And this is the danger, Mr. Speaker, that the Member knows, as I have informed him the other day that, yes, Inuvik is my constituency and that tribal office is in my constituency. I, in fact, during the summer went in there and tried to have...

As I said, I’ll provide that claim process as well as get the update on the impact of the outage and the resulting overvoltage situation. I will provide that. The corporation holds an insurance package that allows for this to be dealt with in that manner as well.

We will consider what can be done and if that is one of the better ways of clearing the air or if we just continue to respect the process and honour that.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Power Corporation does have a claims policy in place that is available to every community as different things affect outages or problems. There have been many claims put in from different customers across the North. The reason that Inuvik is one that has been publicized is because it hit a large part of the community as a result of the outage and an overvoltage situation that fried many of the power bars and so on. In fact, when I was up in Inuvik it occurred and I happened to be in my office when my office one went out as well. Because it hit such a large part of...

That is a fair bit of detail that we’d go into, but the fact is we as a government have the work done to look at the delivery in today’s environment. Leading up to 2007, the government-of-the-day did that work. We also looked at that work and the consideration of what really needs to be done in the North was also put in place, a business case, and the negotiations around the AIP began in that manner. We have looked at those jobs. We have looked at what needs to be delivered and built the negotiation based on that. As I pointed out, the chief negotiators of both sides have signed a letter now...