Michael Miltenberger

As we’ve dealt with this issue, it has evolved over the years. The morel mushrooms tend to follow the season after the fire season. So as fires have come and gone across the Northwest Territories, the issue of morel mushrooms has come up in the South Slave, outside of Yellowknife, in the Member’s constituency, and we’ve been looking at ways to try to deal with and make sure we can manage within the incoming of significant numbers of pickers, given the amount of morel mushrooms. But it is a very transient, intense industry that’s tied to the brief lifespan of the morel mushrooms. We’ve been...

Thank you. We’re back to the position where I do answer the questions and the Member doesn’t like the answer. So if the committee has specific suggestions in terms of regulatory reform that will address the concerns of the Member, then let us see them, and as we move forward with the business planning process and when we look at the time we have left in our legislative agenda, if there are changes that are agreed to, we’d be happy to consider those. Thank you.

Thank you. We have authorities, two in fact, that go out under the consumer affairs bill to look at areas where there are complaints, where there may be concerns. When those are brought forward, they’re dealt with appropriately. Thank you.

Thank you. This government does put people first when you look at the amount of money we spend on social programs, the type of infrastructure we have, the services to people at all levels and ages in our communities. When it comes to protecting them in the marketplace, that’s an area where we’d have to look carefully. Once again, the Member makes strong statements about wanting to know what we’re going to do. I’m not sure if he wants some type of police state. It’s not clear to me. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think the fundamental question is what type of government or what kind of society does the Member envision. He’s calling for government regulation quite regularly in all areas of people’s lives and there is some free market characteristics here that we have in our country that are important. There are things we can do with gas, there are things we can do in some areas, but the fundamental question is what type of society is the Member proposing? What level of government regulation does he expect this government to create so we don’t exist in every facet of everybody’s...

Thank you, Madam Chair. We had an extensive debate about this in November. We had the bill brought forward that reflected the outcome of that debate. As we now look at the bill, the issue that we have avoided – and I’ve said this at every Boundaries Commission that I’ve talked to and every time we’ve debated this in the House – is how much government do we need? How many MLAs do we need for 42,000 people? I know some people will say there should be no price on democracy, we should keep adding MLAs. We have the smallest constituencies, next to Nunavut and the Yukon, in the free world.

We are at...

The Member makes a lot of assertions and a lot of statements that he cites as fact. There was an initial event, a weather event that initiated the cause. We’ve looked at that. We’ve set out an extensive review to make sure we improve our services and our communication, but we have existing processes in place to deal with circumstances related to those types of outages. We’re going to continue to work on our quality assurance and our communications and improvement to services including a $10 million battery that would potentially level out and give us 15 minutes time to adjust to power outages...

We have looked at the impact and cost of the event, the weather event that triggered this cascading of events resulting in a power outage. We’ve had this discussion in the House. We have our policies and approaches to responding to acts of God. Where there are situations where we are responsible for because of our actions or things that have happened that come back on us, we have looked at that approach, as well, but the broad-sweeping assessment that the Member has asked about hasn’t been done that I’ve seen.

Yes, we will provide that information to the House.

My understanding in regard to the concerns out of the Sahtu about water is the concern is specifically about the water being withdrawn from fish lakes as opposed to being withdrawn from the Mackenzie. I do believe that issue is being looked at and, hopefully, will be addressed.

In regard to was there a directive from government, no, there wasn’t in regard to instructing any agency or part of government to atomically reject or not require environmental assessments of fracking.