Wally Schumann

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will redirect that to the director of finance. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The money that you see on line 3 on page 211, the $161,000 is what we give the Northern Frontier Visitor Centre. That would be excluding any other SEED money or something we're doing right now to do the evaluation on the centre. Thank you. Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is not a surplus. This stays within the fund, so as the fund either goes up or down it will be used accordingly, but my understanding is with the NWT Environmental Studies Research Fund is they put out a call for proposals on initiatives annually when they move forward. I don’t want to call it a revolving fund, but it's basically sitting there for the next initiative. Some proposals come in under budget for what they budget for, and I suspect that could be an accumulation of probably that. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We still need to have staff in the oil and gas office. You know, we tend to say 10 years until oil and gas comes back, but we don't control the commodity markets. There is still some interest in it. We are sitting on billions of dollars’ worth of reserves in the Northwest Territories, and when the markets come back, they will have the ability to jump on it and take best advantage of that. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

No, I'll just take his comments as noted. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. As we believe, this is a great line item. It is meeting its objective, but we also have the client services in the communities that relate to Aboriginal consultation requirements in the GNWT. We believe they do a great job. They are working on passing along the information on legislation and mineral and petroleum rights and exploration and development activities in their regions.

We also work in partnership with other departments, like education, on how we can get the mining industry into the classrooms, that we are presently, that the Minister of Education has been...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. If a community was interested in establishing or expanding an existing park, I'm sure we're willing to sit down and have a look at it, and if it fits into our long-term plans we would certainly be welcome to have that conversation. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

These socio-economic agreements that we have in place, which benefit Northern businesses, Aboriginal groups, and Northern people, are a great partnership, and that's how the Government of the Northwest Territories looks at these agreements. We take the partnership approach to it and corroboration and collaboration with these companies to try to bring as much investment and employment opportunities and business opportunities to the residents of the Northwest Territories, and that's the basis of these agreements.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. As we've said, we've taken that funding out, as the Mackenzie Valley Gas Project right now is kind of in a moratorium stage, to figure out what the industry is going to do moving forward. As far as the Aboriginal Pipeline Working Group goes, they're well aware of this reduction, and I believe everything is just on pause until things to decide to move forward. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This would have been actual expenditures on these projects. Thank you, Mr. Chair.