Michael Miltenberger

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. If it hasn’t been all done, it will be done. I haven’t got the final costs yet.

The intent is to have a made-in-the-North regulatory regime that brings together the regulatory authorities, both the oil and gas through water and minerals, lands, with ITI, ENR and the Lands department. We intend to be very thorough, very rigorous, and we want to coordinate our efforts. There is going to be responsibilities that require the various regulatory agencies and bodies to respond as regulators. There are going to be some requirements for technical responses. We are going to look very thoroughly at all of those project applications that come in and we will, in fact, provide that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, I am aware that there are a wide range of views about hydraulic fracturing. I’ve been a recipient of some correspondence through the Council for Canadians, for example, expressing their concern. I do read the newspapers, listen to the news, and talk to people, and yes, I have heard some of those concerns and I believe I do understand them.

I would suggest to the Member that if we weren’t contributing the $13.8 million that we were to cushion the rate increases over the last couple of years and the next coming years that the impact would be dramatically different, and, yes, the Rate Stabilization Fund, which hasn’t had an increase in five years, requires some replenishment, once again, tied to the cost of energy. We are continuing to do all the things that we can, both as the Power Corporation and as a government, to invest millions to branch out into alternate energy, the issues I’ve already answered in the previous question...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve committed as a government in addition to what the Power Corp’s generating through rates of $33 million to cushion the rate increase since there’d been no rate increase for five years. That’s a distinct investment. As well, we are working into all sorts of areas right to alternate energies. We looked at ways to try to address some of the energy costs. Part of the hope of the grid build-out, as well, is more efficiency and economies of scales that would connect the north and southern grids. We would look to try to continue our investments in solar and those other...

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.

[Microphone turned off] …correct a typographical error in the definition “holder” or “interest holder” as the number of the part referred to had been omitted.