Glen Abernethy

I like to go for lunch.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Obviously, we would be going through committee for some discussions around that but we also need to approach the arts community themselves to get a sense of what their expectations might be. Their input into the development of a policy would be valuable as well.

There are a number of different organizations that we could approach just to get ideas, not necessarily to have them draft or work on the draft with us, but we need to get some ideas from them on what they would like to see as performing artists, graphic artists, painters, photographers, any of those individuals...

We’re happy to give that. Some of it will obviously be forecasted. I mean, the true impact is sometimes not known until the building is gone or the construction activity is done, and we don’t include it in our numbers for actual reduction until those items have happened. But we can do some forecasting. We can clearly identify some of the buildings that we know today will likely be coming down during the life of this Assembly, two schools in Inuvik being examples. So we’ll take a stab at that and we’ll try and get the information, and we’ll have an opportunity to discuss that with committee...

Madam Chair, the Member asked a similar question in I think it was business main estimates last year and I committed to having the department go and do an analysis of the space available where we could actually hang pictures or display art, with parameters being it has to be the public area in the buildings rather than, say, office areas or areas that aren’t open to the public.

The department is doing that analysis. We have some early numbers. There is not as much public space as you might imagine, so we are just trying to explore our definition of what is public space.

Once we have that...

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...