I do, thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. On my right I have Sylvia Haener, who is the deputy minister of the Department of Justice. On my left I have Kim Schofield, who is the director of finance of the Department of Justice.

Mr. Speaker, the government is committed to being an inclusive workplace open to all Northerners. A diverse workplace improves our ability to serve the public.

Today I would like to provide Members with highlights from the recent Inclusive Public Service Survey, conducted by the NWT Bureau of Statistics on behalf of the Department of Human Resources. It was developed in consultation with the GNWT Advisory Committee on Employability. The survey was conducted in the first half of this year, and asked all GNWT employees to share their perspectives on a wide range of workplace diversity topics. The...

Sure, Madam Chair, I just said it doesn’t disappear by itself. It needs investment.

We indicated that we need to know as soon as possible, because as we move forward with construction, we are pouring the foundation, we are doing that work. We are getting ready to move into other parts of the construction. Once we finalize the look of the boiler room or the heating room, the utility room, we run out of options. We have to be ready to put in our biomass system or another system. A month or two.

I actually disagree. We will need to maintain that $5 million and possibly increase it in order to get this number to continue to drop. Cost of doing business continues to go up. Cost of some of these retrofits is going to continue to go up. We have a lot of old buildings that didn’t have regular lifecycle upgrades and that’s how we got into this situation to begin with. A lot of those buildings aren’t planned for complete replacement for extended periods of time, if they’re even on the plan at this point, and we still have a requirement to make sure that they’re to code and that they are safe...

Thank you, Madam Chair. We are intending to use the facilities, the new building, to help provide heat or to provide heat to the two existing buildings. It is the Stuart Hodgson Building and the Laing Building. We will save 785 tonnes of greenhouse gases annually by the option that we have selected, biomass for the new building.

The Member has mentioned the district heating and any options that we have there. I said it before, I will say it again, we haven’t finalized the plans. We still have a small window where we can switch to, in construction, a district heating. If it was to come forward...

If the question was as simple as that, it wouldn’t be that hard to agree. There’s more to it than that and the Member knows that.

We can put the pellets in, but until people start purchasing and have the money to actually put in their own pellet heating systems – which we all know a pellet boiler in a house is probably $20,000 even with the subsidies that are available through organizations like Arctic Energy Alliance – many people in the small communities aren’t going to be able to afford those anyway. We need to work with the communities to help them create a market. When the demand is there...

Thank you, Madam Chair. When individual departments defer maintenance, this is when we utilize the Deferred Maintenance Program. By deferring maintenance, I’m referring to the fact where the practice of postponing maintenance activities such as repairs on buildings and infrastructure in order to save costs meet funding levels or realign the available funding. During the lifecycle of a building, usually about halfway through the midlife, there’s a requirement to do some major upgrades and make sure that everything is up to date and running fast, and that the building needs are still meeting the...

Madam Chair, we own the lot that the Tapwe Building was on previously. We are using that property and the property that we obtained where there used to be an old church. We obtained those properties, so we are responsible for, and the price of taking down the Tapwe Building, decommissioning it, disposing of it, is included in this budget.