Robert C. McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The funding is distributed by the NWT Sport and Rec Council based on an application process. This is approved by the Minister. So that’s how all the organizations get their funding through the Sport and Rec Council. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, we are just over 16 months away from the next Arctic Winter Games being hosted in Nuuk, Greenland. As you know, there are six sports which Greenland is unable to host: dog mushing, gymnastics, curling, speed skating, figure skating and midget hockey. Today I am pleased to announce that Whitehorse, Yukon, has agreed to host an alternative multi-sport event, the Arctic X Games, to coincide with the 2016 Arctic Winter Games in Greenland.

Mr. Speaker, this is great news for our athletes and territorial sport organizations affected by the exclusion of some sports from the 2016 Arctic...

Again, because we’re early in this and we need some longer term baseline information to better identify the high users, I think we’ll be able to do that, and once we all identify the high users, we can work with the local housing authorities to work with those particular clients to make them aware of the usage. This will also help us in our energy retrofits. If we find a unit in a community is costing us a lot more, depending on the family size, the unit size, then that would be a prime candidate for some of our major modernization and improvement programs. We’ll be using all that information...

We will include this information in our annual report and then in our performance measures as we publish this part of the business plans. We are also happy to make this information available on our website. Once we start gathering a bit more solid baseline data, we will put that up on our website as well.

Thank you. We are partners with ECE and Health and Social Services through the Healthy Choices initiative and some of the programs that we work with through the Active After School Program and we have a food program that’s pretty well fully subscribed to. I think just about every community and school in the Northwest Territories receives money, except one, through the Active After School Program. So we work with our colleagues over at ECE and Health and Social Services to try and access as much money as we can that we pass on to communities to deliver all the important programs that they run...

These organizations submit budgets and the funding is application-based. So we assume that they’re calculating their own forced growth as part of their application. Thank you.

I’m sure the role we can play is if we were to get some complaints, I’m sure we can forward those on to the Competition Bureau of Canada, or we can put the information on the website that we’ve just developed where we’ve provided a bunch of information to people. We can make it known what their numbers are, if people have a concern. But again, we’ve had one complaint, I believe, in the last year.

Obviously, being consumer affairs and people expecting us to assist them when they have concerns is something that we should have a look at to see if we can forward their concerns to the Competition...

In a lot of the market communities, a lot of these are driven by what the actual owners of these gas stations pay for the product that they bring in. I’m sure if they bring product in at a lower price, then that price will also be reflected at the pump. I’ve seen it firsthand where our supplier got some gasoline a little cheaper and our prices actually had gone down by a few cents. My understanding is the prices here in the capital have been fairly level for the last 18 months.

---Interjection

That, I wouldn’t be able to answer. I would have to consult with the Minister of Public Works, who is responsible for bringing fuel into the communities. I will have that conversation with the Minister and share the findings with the Member.

Four years. They’ve been fairly level for the last four years.

There’s an opportunity for consumers out there if they feel that there’s price fixing or price maintenance, there’s an opportunity for them to contact Competition Canada, because they enforce the Competition Act and they would be able to do an investigation into the concerns of the consumers that call them.