Louis Sebert

Mr. Speaker, I can commit to reviewing the situation. I don't know whether I could really commit to having the sheriff's officers conduct the duties suggested by the Member opposite as I believe that would require a significant change of legislation. So I am prepared, certainly, to look at the overall issue, but I don't think I can make any commitment as to any certainty as to whether we would be increasing the duties that the sheriff's officers already have. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, certainly, we are always looking at new ways of being more efficient. I'm rather concerned that moving officers around in the manner suggested by the Member opposite might actually involve a greater loss. RCMP budgets or, rather, our portion of it, which is 70 per cent, has been growing exponentially over the last five or six years, but I certainly will, as I mentioned earlier, undertake to the Member opposite to look at this whole issue. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

It is some time since I've reviewed the legislation, and, in fact, I may have never reviewed the legislation. I will, however, undertake to the Member opposite that I will review the legislation. I was under the impression that we would either have to enact new legislation in the form of a police act or something along those lines to allow the sheriffs to take on these additional duties, but I will certainly undertake to look into the matter.

Mr. Speaker, I don't know if I entirely understand the question. The question is whether G Division officers, who are in the RCMP, could replace other officers within the RCMP? Either way, it's still RCMP officers, Mr. Speaker. I may have misunderstood the question. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, this is all tied, of course, to the strategy to which groups will be invited to participate including NUL. So we're hoping to get a broad discussion about where the Power Corporation is going. Certainly, we are looking at more inventive ways and cheaper ways and more energy-efficient ways of delivering power to the Northwest Territories. That remains our goal.

Mr. Speaker, one of the issues with solar is that obviously it's not sunny all year round. I would anticipate that if there was a system that could have proper batteries for storage of power or if the wind was so consistent that it provided power throughout the year and we didn’t need diesel at all, we would certainly contemplate that type of system, but currently the technology is not there and it's not cheap.

Mr. Speaker, our vision, the vision of the Power Corporation, is to be provider of choice to our customers, a valuable partner to industry and Aboriginal groups within the Northwest Territories. So that is the vision of the Power Corporation.

They're the experimental and new technologies that are coming along, it is our intention of course to use those first in the thermal communities as we wish to get off of diesel power. But there are other initiatives. We are also encouraging people to reduce the amount of power they use to LED, more efficient refrigerators and so on, so we're hoping that the amount of power that they require is going to be reduced, and this 20 per cent figure which has been referenced several times today is a technical number in the sense that if you're going to have a mixture of diesel and solar, you can't go...

Clearly, lower costs would be a benefit both to private individuals and to industry. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, connecting with the national or even international grid clearly would not be a short-term thing we could possible contemplate, as it would be a very expensive project to connect either through Saskatchewan or Alberta. There are costs, but certainly there have been talks at a very high level about that very project and we will be in talks with Saskatchewan as to the possibility of such a project proceeding; however, it is a project of great complexity involving several governments, also involving several Aboriginal groups on our side of the border and several on the Saskatchewan...