Michael Miltenberger

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following two documents, entitled “Supplementary Estimates (Infrastructure Expenditures), No. 4, 2014-15,” and “Supplementary Estimates (Operations Expenditures), No. 2, 2014-2015”. Thank you.

Thank you. That’s part of the $200 million that the Premier referenced that we’re paying in subsidies, and if we’re going to do that for every homeowner and every business in the Northwest Territories, then I would suggest that even the hydro community folks would be there demanding that they have to pay heating fuel as well. I think it would truly beggar this government and would be very counterproductive if we just subsidized the cost of fuel. There would be no incentive for business to drop the prices.

As the world price goes down, they know that whatever they charge we will pay. We’re far...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Over the last three years with Inuvik’s troubles with their gas wells taking on water and the issue of using propane, between the Power Corp and the government, we’ve put in about $8 million to make sure we’ve tried to cushion the blow of the loss of the gas. We’ve switched the Power Corp initially to diesel; we switched our buildings back to diesel to make sure we freed up much cheaper gas to the people of Inuvik. On top of that we have a lot of programs for conservation, energy efficiencies, appliances, insulation, windows, which reduce your energy requirements. But...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the Member’s concern and his comments. If you look at the whole fiscal picture at the end of this Assembly or where we currently are now, I would say while we have challenges, it’s not as bleak as the Member would indicate and we are doing an enormous amount of very critical things like the $350 million project at Stanton. We’re discussing a $314 million capital plan, which we bumped up $50 million this year. So there are enormous challenges for a government this size, for a territory this large with the demands as many and varied as they are.

This...

Yes, I do, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In regards to the second part of the motion, we of course are going to be looking at the fire crews. We had very good fortune and a good response when we started training emergency firefighters, and the issue of are we adequately staffed on the ground is one we’re going to look at as part of our comprehensive annual review that we do. So we are going to work on that.

In relation with community firefighters, fighting residential fires is one that we haven’t explored that much, but we definitely are going to be looking at are we staffed up to the right degree with the...

Yes, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

We, as a government, have mapped out our next steps, now that we know the transmission project is prohibitively expensive to look at generation in all the communities. That is the plan where we believe there is the ability to seriously affect the cost of living.

The Member would know, as a Member of this Legislative Assembly, while from Inuvik, to look at all the needs of people in the Northwest Territories, that it would not be possible just to look at Inuvik as a stand-alone community for some special subsidy when you listen to the cost of living in McPherson and Tsiigehtchic and Sachs and...

As I indicated, we are looking at trying to minimize the reliance on diesel. We’re looking at a whole host of ways to do that. So no, there is no subsidy for heating fuel being considered. If we did it we’d have to do it for every thermal community, we’d have to do it across the Northwest Territories. It would be tremendously expensive and at the end of the day I don’t think it would do much over the long term to minimize reliance and encourage people to look at other alternatives other than diesel. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. With me is the deputy minister, Ernie Campbell; and head of forest fire operations, Bill Mawdsley.