Michael Miltenberger

Mr. Speaker, the Power Corporation is a Crown corporation, ostensibly arm’s length, but it has, in fact, evolved into a much closer working relationship, very similar to the working relationship that we have with the Housing Corporation. It is a vehicle of our social and economic policy and energy policy and sits at the table with other deputies. Comes to all the high level meetings with the chairman of the board and the president to look at how do we move on things like the expansion of hydro, how do we look at generation issues, handling things like the installation of the solar array in...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Of course, if there is an interest by committee to have a chat or discussion or meeting with Finance or a briefing on rules for transfer between O and M and capital, while it is done and there are rules and ways to do it, we would be happy to have that discussion. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The records indicate $190,000. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It’s a shared interest. The private sector, as well, is struggling, in many cases, to find staff and people and get people to stay to avoid having fly-in/fly-out, which is why we’ve started this working group with the Chamber of Mines, the Chamber of Commerce and the three diamond mines to talk about what can we do together, how do we work together. Things like going south jointly to go to trades fairs and those types of things. We’re working with our own departments, Education for example, to really take advantage of this Express Entry Program that the federal...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. What we have before us today was we have a very modest capital budget of $210,000. Last year it was higher, but I’ll ask the deputy if he can speak to that in a little more detail. I can provide the detail for committee about the discrepancy from the actuals, the capital estimate to the revised estimates, but I don’t have that detail here with me.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the Member’s comments in his closing statement about working to serve the residents the best we can. As we sit here today with our capital budget, we are of course making the case that SAM cash management module and the SAM strategic sourcing and supplier contract management module will in fact help us do a better job at our part of managing the affairs of the government. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We’ve initiated discussions through the initiative of trying to increase the population by 2,000 in the next five years with industry, the mines, in particular the Chamber of Mines plus the Chamber of Commerce, to look at how we minimize the fly-in/fly-out population and look at what opportunities are there as they come up with an expedited immigrant application process, which is going to come into play here in the new year.

We’ve also done a lot of work internally as a department to move to fill our very new vacancies we have both inside and outside of Yellowknife. We...

Yes, Madam Chair.

At this point, not that I’m aware of.

Of course, we are open to all alternative energy opportunities that are out there. I would point out that this project, two or three years ago, was projected to cost anywhere from $16 million to $20 million for 600 kilowatts, which is a very, very expensive price to pay. We had offered up a 25-year power purchase agreement. In addition to the cost to install, there were some very significant ongoing costs because of the high mineral content of the water. It would require ongoing scaling and potential drilling of additional holes and wells.

We would be more than willing to revisit this to see if...