Wally Schumann

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following two documents entitled "Annual Report Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act Department of Infrastructure 2017;" and "Follow-up Letter to Oral Question 117-18(3): Immigration Recruitment." Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I don't think the knowledge economy is about rewarding people. The knowledge economy is about bringing new methodologies to the table, new ideas, how to do business better, how to make things better for climate change adaptation. How do we increase the fibre connectivity of the North to Southerners, satellite facilities, these sorts of things. I don't think there's a reward base. Private business rewards itself with innovation that makes it more cost effective. Innovation brings more investment dollars from outside the country. That's the type of rewards that private businesses bring. It's not...

Mr. Speaker, this question came up yesterday when we were in front of committee. The deputy answered it, but there's a fulsome answer. This was a renewed mandate commitment to this Assembly. The knowledge economy is something new to the Legislative Assembly. There's a brand new FPT table surrounding this with the federal government. The federal government has taken a new approach to this on innovation. They've announced their clusters across the country, what they've committed to doing. We've had engagement with them on how we can try to include ourselves in some of these clusters, but as a...

I don't have the exact dates in front of me, but from my recollection from what I read from my briefing note before on the update on this is, when the ferry service pulled out, the one crossing was put in within 10 days of that date, and the other one was within a month's time. With our new equipment, there was a significant challenge this year, and we have actually done it still in record time because of the warming temperatures.

The Climate Change Strategic Framework will set the overall approach to addressing climate change. It will also guide the broader interests that go beyond just energy. It's going to do climate research, adaptation, resilience activities. The Energy Strategy, as I said, is the primary tool to look at greenhouse gas reductions and energy use in the NWT as set out by our draft that we will be tabling at some point.

Carbon pricing is something that we have been working on that needs to be implemented and encourages carbon conservation, so less use of fossil fuels and the substitutions of that...

As the Member has stated in this House, he named off all of the targets that we have, and he is correct. Industry has no target in there. We know that industry needs to do its part on this side of things. The Government of the Northwest Territories is going to support their efforts in an incentive program to help industry reduce their emissions around a carbon pricing that we will be bringing forward.

People have asked us how we get these targets, and what we have done, we went to a federal database on the national inventory report on greenhouse gas emissions, and this is where we got our...

As I have said, we are moving forward with this. The next step is the procurement process of this process, and once we select the contractor, our project team will be getting together to redefine the prototype of the building. As part of that process, we will be engaging the community on this and get their input, but the project team will also include regional staff and local staff. They will be engaging the Health and Social Services authority, which will be engaging the community as well; so we will be able to implement some of the specific things that the community probably wants to see in...

The Canyon Creek project is a 14 kilometre access road from Norman Wells to the Canyon Creek bridge, as many of us know. We have talked about it in the House many times. Same thing, this is one that we have done with a local group and a local contractor. I was up there early on in the start of this project, and I got to spend some time with some of the students who were doing the simulator training, very similar to what was going on the ITH. I can say that over 70 people are working on this project right now, and 75 per cent of them are Northerners.

Incentives is one thing; tax breaks is another thing. Those aren't rewards. Those are things that are put in place to bring industry to the Northwest Territories, and we will continue to look at that. I will talk to my department and our officials to see what our plans are moving forward with the knowledge economy. I would probably suggest to the Member that I will have the deputy talking to the deputies' working group and see how we're going to pull things together, and I will update the Member when I get this information. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

We have a world-class facility in Inuvik, which is one option. There are all types of knowledge economy that we can pull together. It could be something based around climate change, research, adaptation, these sorts of things, but I think, as a government as a whole, this has ended up in ITI's lap. We need to take a whole government approach and have possibly even a working group to consider how we want to approach this, because it's a very complicated deal. Do we want to target the cluster situation? Do we want to look at pulling everything within the Northwest Territories together to do it...