Jane Groenewegen

On this community-by-community basis, the rates are set and the Public Utilities Board examines the cost of delivering that service and approves those rates. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d also like to recognize former colleagues. I won’t name them, as they’ve been mentioned here before. I’d also like to recognize a little girl, Mikayla Jacobson. When we had a retreat up in Tuktoyaktuk one time, I met her before I met our Speaker. We attended a child care centre there, and Mr. Ramsay and I were both quite smitten with this beautiful little girl that was sitting there. She was so engaging in talking to us, and when she arrived here last night at the Assembly, she wanted to go immediately down to Mr. Ramsay’s office to say hello. What a delightful young...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Your committee would like to report progress. I move that the report of Committee of the Whole be concurred with. Thank you. Mr. Speaker.

I’d like to call Committee of the Whole to order. Before we proceed with any business in Committee of the Whole, I’m going to call a break.

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So, nothing about our approval or assessment process has changed specifically in relation to fracking, which is something, as we said, relatively new.

On the issue of a timeline for the kind of things that Minister Miltenberger is referring to, how far down the road of approvals for this activity are we going to go before these things that Mr. Miltenberger refers to are actually in place? Are there a lot of companies out there, or even ConocoPhillips… Is there a lot more of this activity imminent at this time? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I continue to have questions and concerns raised to me by constituents around the issue of fracking in the Northwest Territories. There is so much information out there on this topic. People read it and they are concerned. We’ve had members of the EDI committee who have gone on investigative tours to see how this process is impacting other jurisdictions and this information has come back. I’d like to ask the Minister some really simple questions.

In terms of fracking, what is the status of approvals for this activity in the Northwest Territories at this time? Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, another issue that seems to have been brought into this is the issue of the franchise fee. I just happen to have my Yellowknife power bill here. It clearly states in here what the franchise fee is about. Franchise fee is a flow-through fee that is approved by the Public Utilities Board that allows, in tax-based municipalities, the service provider to avoid paying a tax on the land or the infrastructure where transmission is located and then this cost is paid directly to the community by the service provider.

I will quote Mr. Miltenberger again, he said, “I will indicate clearly...

Thank you, Mr. Lafferty. I’d like to ask the Minister if he would like to bring witnesses into the Chamber.

If we want to start at zero, you want to be starting off in school and trained and educated at zero. Anyway, I don’t know. I can go along, for the interest of political expediency and for some of the good arguments, like Ms. Bisaro does raise a good argument. I probably have a son and a daughter-in-law that would have had more kids, but daycare is expensive and they both have careers and they both work. They probably would have had two or three more if… I shouldn’t be speaking like that, sorry. Very self-serving from a grandmother’s point of view, but perhaps there are families that would...

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. Any further general comments. Does the committee agree that there are no further general comments? Clause by clause, review the bill?