Tom Beaulieu

Sorry, Mr. Chairman, legislative counsel.

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

The Stabilization Fund is there to stabilize the cost of fuel, that is correct; however, it is not there to provide subsidies. What the Member is asking for is for us to take a look at stabilizing at last year’s rate for an indefinite period of time, or six months, then what we would have to do is we would have to recover that cost at some point from somewhere. So, the only place where we have the ability to reduce the cost below the 100 percent is in Colville and Tsiigehtchic. Aside from that, other communities are too big, that once we start to provide any sort of percentage subsidy, it...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The cost of gasoline or diesel motives or heating oil is all based on the purchase costs, the transportation, the commission that it costs us to deliver from our tanks to the homes or the cost of administering what they have there, which we refer to as operations and maintenance as well. Also, we keep track of the product evaporation and taxes. That’s it; there’s no profit on any of the fuels that we sell. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to move a motion.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have with me, to my immediate right, Shirley Desjardins, deputy minister of Human Resources; on my far right, Nicole MacNeil, director of labour relations; and to my left, Ken Chutskoff, legal counsel.

The Member is correct that the wrong information and the wrong place was given out, and that was corrected. We had advised the community that that had occurred and we then issued the correct price to the community. However, again, it’s a fairly simple process that we have no ability to subsidize. Like I said to the Member, we do have an ability to stabilize the fund and that’s what we do, we try to stabilize the fund so that the constituents are not seeing sharp costs in fuel fluctuations in the cost of gasoline. So, I will check into exactly what had occurred, what type of information had...

Mr. Speaker, the department, through the petroleum products division, has no ability to subsidize fuel. What we do have is the ability to stabilize the cost, so we have a Stabilization Fund that we use so that there are not sharp fluctuations in the costs. We use that fund to ensure that there isn’t a sharp increase at inappropriate times and so on. This fund, the Petroleum Fund, does not give us the ability to subsidize or we would run out and we would have to change the revolving fund. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I’m going to have Ms. MacNeil explain the process of how the positions are filled. I don’t know how we would go about trying to talk about what happens in the department that’s going to be receiving the affected employee and what happens in there, but we will do our best to try to answer the concern. I’ll ask Ms. MacNeil to add more to that.

Like I indicated, we had discussions with NTCL. As a government, we are one of the prime customers of NTCL. We do business with NTCL when we are shipping in the summertime. We do all our ordering in January before the season starts so that we are ready to go. When the first ships leave, then our stuff is on there. This year we did have things and items and some fuel on the ships that were turned around, but those were some of the reserve fuels that we had and some materials that we could get in through other methods.