Kevin O'Reilly

Thanks very much to the Minister for that commitment. I know that Alberta just went on the market to get some additional power. They spend a billion dollars to get 600 megawatts of wind energy at 3.7 cents/kilowatt hour. We are paying over 23, I think, 24 cents/kilowatt hour here in Yellowknife, so I am trying to figure out the Minister's rationale for saying that Alberta and Saskatchewan are actually going to want to buy our power. We should be actually bringing it up from Alberta. Can the Minister provide some rationale for why he thinks that Alberta and Saskatchewan will actually want to...

Merci, Monsieur le President. Thanks to the Minister for that, and I hope that he can make the figure actually public. In the Minister's statement yesterday, he claims that the full expansion or some kind of expansion of Taltson hydro is going to remove up to 240,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, in the 2030 Energy Strategy, the claim is 227,000 kilotonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. So maybe hopes are growing that Taltson is going to continue to grow, but what is going on with these greenhouse gas reduction figures, and can the Minister explain the discrepancy? Which one is the...

Thanks to the Minister for that, and I will double check to see where the $120,000 is coming from, whether it's the capital or the O and M budget. As far as I know, there are no buyers for Taltson expansion power, no secured funding other than this little drop in the bucket, and no business case. Can the Minister explain whether there is a business case for the Taltson expansion or when that might be ready and whether it will be shared with the public and this side of the House?

Merci, Monsieur le President. On January 23rd, federal and territorial governments announced funding for the Taltson Hydro Expansion projects. There is $480,000 from Canada to support feasibility and engineering work for the expansion and $620,000 to support Indigenous engagement. Our government will have to come up with $120,000 for the feasibility and engineering work. It's not clear who will actually receive the money, when, and whether this is old money or new.

Hydro-electricity is not necessarily green energy. There are impacts on water quality, aquatic life, release of greenhouse gases...

Merci, Monsieur le President. I would like to table the following document. It's a letter dated February 7, 2019, from the Union of Northern Workers to the Minister of Finance, regarding arbitration on GNWT and Northwest Territories Power Corporation negotiations. Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.

I'd like to thank the Minister for that, telling about the new interest. In my statement earlier today, I said that there is a lack of transparency around this new framework. The valuation matrix is nowhere to be found on the ITI website, so I hope these two new companies were able to find it somewhere. There doesn't seem to be any monitoring framework or public reporting under the new framework. Can the Minister explain how potential manufacturers can put together an application without knowing how they will be ranked or rated?

Merci, Monsieur le president. My questions are for the Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment. I certainly gave him a heads-up about this first question I want to ask him. Can the Minister tell us the maximum annual value of rough diamonds used for manufacturing here in the Northwest Territories, and what that figure is as a percentage of total production in that year? Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.

Thanks, Mr. Speaker, and I want to thank the Minister for that really helpful commitment at the end. The matrix that is used to evaluate the proposals is finally going to get posted to the website.

Over the last 20 years, our efforts to establish and maintain a viable secondary diamond industry have been a failure. Would the Minister agree that the easiest and best way to retain benefits is to ensure that we would collect a fair royalty for the extraction of diamonds and other minerals and that this should be accomplished through a public and independent review?

Thanks to the Minister for that. Wow. We're not using very many of those diamonds that are supposed to be made available. I know that the changes to the Diamond Policy Framework are relatively new, but can the Minister tell us how many approved NWT diamond manufacturers there are now and if any new ones have applied under the new policy framework?

Merci, Monsieur le President. On December 6, 2018, changes were announced to the Diamond Policy Framework. The framework was established in 1999. It was intended to foster a secondary diamond manufacturing industry and provide local employment. It has obviously not succeeded, and I have to wonder whether this new approach is going to be much better.

The new policy allows manufacturers to export a portion of their NWT rough diamonds in exchange for other investments in the NWT economy, such as jewellery manufacturing, retail outlets, tourism partnerships, and other related endeavours. The hope...