Michael Miltenberger

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. At this point we are contributing $250,000 a year and there is a 20-year period where we can’t touch the principal.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would agree that we want to, in the coming year, as we look at increasing the amount of money we’re going to put into infrastructure, have a serious discussion how much of that money, that extra $50 million a year goes into energy infrastructure. We will be coming forward, as I have indicated a number of times now and the Premier has also made reference. We are going to come forward with a number of major initiatives, one tied to hydro in the North and South Slave focusing mainly initially on transmission and then we are, as well, going to lay out what we think is a...

That’s correct, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The subsidies are linked to the rates and as the rates of power go up, and we’ve been having the rate increases over the X number of years, even though they’ve been cushioned, the subsidy goes up commensurately, and they’re linked, so they’re going to keep moving together.

The criteria for the formula stay the same, so it’s still governed by things like tax effort and the amount of money spent in other jurisdictions. And their operations, as I indicated in my budget address, we anticipate with the deficit reduction going on across the land, that our formula could be affected negatively, but the criteria and all the elements of the formula have been left in place until 2018-19, but we’re still bound by those variables.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There has been significant improvement in terms of the time. We have met yearly, at least I meet yearly, the staff meets more often with the Audit Bureau, the audit folks, and we work with all the agencies that are supposed to be reporting in. We have shortened that timeline and are going to keep working on shortening it. There has been recognition of the improvement by the Auditor General, but I’ll ask the deputy if he wants to add anything further to that matter.

We get revised amounts monthly, but the date by which most returns are in is October, so October is a month we look to to get more certainty.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We are reasonably happy. There are many things we don’t control when it comes to risk management. For example, the majority of our communities are in the middle of the Boreal Forest. There are more and more extreme weather events across the land. The whole concept of stationarity, which is the predictability of those types of occurrences, has all but disappeared. The insurance business, in fact, no longer looks at stationarity because it makes forecasting and doing insurance, and making projections almost impossible. Given a number of those broader major variables, we...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have with me the deputy minister, Mr. Mike Aumond, and the deputy secretary to the Financial Management Board, Mr. Sandy Kalgutkar. If either one of them faint tonight it’s because I was insensitive and did not invite them in to have supper, and I publicly apologize for that.

Thank you. We’re looking at two things here, but we’re going to be, from the start and on into the future, a major partner in this if we go out to Aboriginal governments. Once the debt is paid off it will generate revenue. What we’re looking at is what would be a more modest than would be normal return on investment so that we can make our best efforts to keep the cost of service into the communities as reasonable as possible, which we think will generate a longer-term benefit and get us more customers. So, yes, there is going to be revenue generation and it’s also going to have some broader...