Michael Miltenberger

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to thank the Member for raising this issue yet again here in a very clear way. As I indicated in the House, we are revising our Greenhouse Gas Strategy and we’re going to convert it to a climate change strategy. That document will be out in the next couple weeks as a discussion document. I can assure the Member that regardless of who’s in this House, in these chairs, the issue of climate change is going to continue to play a major role.

I would, as well, point out that in the last eight years, if you added the money we’ve spent on low water, not even counting...

Mr. Speaker, it is with great pleasure that I rise today to advise Members of this Assembly that our government will be signing a transboundary water management agreement with British Columbia for the shared waters of the Liard and Petitot basins.

This agreement, the second one to be signed with an upstream jurisdiction this year, is another step in ensuring the waters of the Northwest Territories remain clean, abundant and productive for all time.

Similar to the one signed with Alberta in March, this bilateral agreement with British Columbia was shaped by the input of Aboriginal governments in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following two documents, entitled “Interim Financial Statements of the Government of the Northwest Territories for the Year Ended March 31, 2015;” and “Inter-Activity Transfers Exceeding $250,000 for the Period April 1 to June 30, 2015.” Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, the Northwest Territories Power Corporation, or NTPC, continues to adapt and manage its resources to meet the needs of the ever-changing environment of power generation in the North.

For the second year in a row, NTPC is addressing low water on the Snare hydro system; however, extremely low water at Bluefish this year has added to the challenge. While NTPC is effectively managing the use of water and diesel to ensure a stable power supply to the North Slave, this government, with the support of the Legislative Assembly, contributed $20 million to ensure that additional diesel costs...

Thank you. The major concern was, of course, if a complaint was raised with a government service officer who would then file, then they would become party to an action that they may not in fact know that much about or may be caught up in an illegal proceedings that would make their job very, very difficult. So, are there ways to better be able to report? I think with new technologies, for example, coming down the valley if we have every community on fibre optic links and there’s better communications that people can phone. We had Safer Neighbourhoods legislation two Assemblies ago and there...

We have about $570 million that we hold in securities. That number has gone up from initially it was about $500 million. As we are getting into this business, there are constant reviews being done and if there are discrepancies then we work through the regulatory process to address those.

This is a shared responsibility under the water licences and environmental assessments. The majority of the money is handled by and flows through ENR through that process. We are looking at, as a government, how do we best structure ourselves to better provide oversight for all these outstanding securities across the land. We recognized very clearly after devolution that the federal government wasn’t paying anywhere near the attention they should have to this matter, and we’re currently at work internally still sorting out what’s the best way to structure ourselves to do that.

This is a journey of some duration we started back in 2005. We’ve made set targets and most of them were inward looking as a government, trying to put our own house in order. We are going to be putting out a new document, a renewal, but it’s not a Greenhouse Gas Strategy anymore. It’s going to be a Climate Change Strategy. That document is expected to be ready in the next couple weeks.

We are gearing up to be able to go to COP 21 in Paris, which I think, contrary to COP 12 or 15 that I attended in Copenhagen, which was supposed to be a seminal event, this one actually will be with the president...

With this big, pressing issue there are two things we need to do, of course. The mitigation that we’ve talked about in terms of reducing our greenhouse gases, our carbon footprint, switching to alternative energies, will have some immediate impact in terms of costs and effect of costs of living, but the longer term goal would be do our share, as global citizens, to reduce our carbon emissions and help mitigate the increasing temperatures. In the meantime, we also have to adapt, and as the Member has pointed out, we have had some structural failures. We’ve had pile replacements. This Highway No...

We tend to travel on the honour system but there is an implicit understanding that MLAs would be reporting back, because they’re usually there representing a committee that they would be reporting back to the events that they attended, the meetings they attended, and the important affairs that they dealt with and discussed while on those travels. At this point, that’s basically the extent in terms of compliance or reporting back as to exactly what events were attended. The Ministers, of course, have more accountability and are prepared and will disclose all the meetings they’ve had and all the...