Jane Groenewegen

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s a pleasure to be back here in the Legislative Assembly. It seems like we were gone for a long time.

Mr. Speaker, today I wanted to just touch on a few items related to devolution. The Premier has highlighted some of these benefits in his sessional statement that he just provided. He’s talked about jobs and he’s talked about the control of land and water and resources. I think we need to keep our eye on the big picture here. The revenues from royalties and the positions that will transfer to the North are, of course, a wonderful benefit and we’d like to see more of...

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister Miltenberger.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister Miltenberger.

Agreed, thank you. I’ll ask the Sergeant-at-Arms to please escort the witnesses to the table.

For the record, Minister Miltenberger, please introduce your witnesses.

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

Alright. We will resume with that after a short break.

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I’d like to call Committee of the Whole to order. What is the wish of committee today? Ms. Bisaro.

Again, not so many years ago we did have a business in Alberta that is very informed with respect to the development of energy and hydro, and we could never seem to advance that discussion as far as we wanted to. We had an unsolicited proposal from ATCO, out of Alberta, to partner with us to expand the Taltson. They’ve got money; they’ve got experience. One of the concerns at the time was that we didn’t have the capacity on our side of the table to negotiate something that people thought would be fair for the Northwest Territories.

Do we have that capacity now and could we still be looking at...

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My Member’s statement was a little all over the map today, I just had so much to talk about, I’m trying to get it all out there in the first day, but I’m going to try to cut back a little bit and just be a little more methodical about this now.

I’d like to ask the Premier – he’s talked about devolution, we’ve talked a lot about devolution. We’ve talked a lot about devolution in terms of jobs and the resource revenue proceeds from the resources that leave the Northwest Territories. The bigger picture has got to come to play in the fact that we will have more control, but...