Michael Miltenberger

Doing something crazy is not normally a guarantee for any type of longevity in the business that we’re in. I take the Member’s point; we’ve been doing things now for the life of this government in terms of investing in alternative energy in a whole range of areas, including biomass. We have, I would suggest, in most communities, stores that stock and sell stoves. There’s assistance there for people. The question is, and the debate would be, what the role of government is. Is it to go into everybody’s home and say we’re here to put in a woodstove or is it to help people make the right choices...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We’ll commit to get that information for the Member.

Mr. Chairman, we work closely with the federal government in terms of estimating and the targets that are set and we have a standard approach that is agreed to by jurisdictions across the country for the benefit of consistency and certainty. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, there are two main areas of discussion. We have suggested how our debt is treated is the debt that is what is called self-financing be treated differently from our normal borrowing practices. By self-financing debt, of course, we mean the money that is owed by the Power Corporation and the Housing Corporation and the bridge when it comes on-line will be mainly self-financing. That is one area. The other issue and area of discussion is going to be when you have a number, is it better to have a specific dollar number in legislation or an agreement or is it better to have a formula...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Margaret Melhorn, deputy minister of Finance; Mr. Jamie Koe, director of policy and planning.

Mr. Chairman, I am here to present the Department of Finance’s main estimates for the 2011-2012 fiscal year.

For 2011-2012 the Department of Finance is requesting a total operations budget of $100.784 million. This is a $9.316 million decrease from the 2011-2012 Main Estimates and represents an 8.5 percent reduction to funding levels. The items that effect this change are highlighted as follows:

Excluding the contribution funding provided to the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation, there is a net increase of $203,000 proposed for the Department of Finance’s operations budget. This...

I appreciate the Member’s comments.

Mr. Speaker, I’m sure NorthwesTel would actually look forward to an opportunity to be invited before committee. They’re a private operation that runs... They have contracts; they have services they provide. We have a lot of vested interest with them. We are going to take steps to see how do we avoid this in the future to get a better idea of what steps they’re going to take to address some of the concerns that the Member has raised. At the same time, we’re going to proceed with our plan to see about setting the pieces in place that will allow us to proceed with trying to get a fibre optics...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. At this point we’re budgeting with the numbers that we do have recognizing, for example, that the price of fuel is now back over, depending where you look -- either the Brent Crude or the West Texas -- it’s either $100 or over $110 a barrel. We anticipate that there’s going to be upward pressure in costs in everything we do, including the provision of diesel generated power.

NorthwesTel manages its own day-to-day operations. We are involved through a number of different areas, but there will be a critical debriefing done. We recognize that there was a significant portion of the Territory that was cut off from communications. One of the reasons, in fact, that we’ve put out an RFP to do some initial work on the fibre optics line up to Inuvik is to, in fact, try to better address some of those issues. But to keep in mind, though, as the weather events around the world increase in extremities and to the degree of how intense they are, that it’s going to be a problem...