Wally Schumann

The Member throws a lot of comments out there. There are a lot of issues around both of these procurement issues, and I am not going to talk about it in this House because that is privy information. He is throwing stuff out there that is not realistic to the rest of the policy that helps northern businesses under the BIP policy. Our preference is to continue with the way we do business, and I have said it in this House a number of times: we are going to continue to the way we do business and follow our policies.

Significant amount of clean-up work has been done at the Hay River shipyard site last year. We worked closely with the Department of Workers' Compensation to ensure that health and safety concerns to the public and employees would be mitigated appropriately and to develop a plan and a timeline that the site's assessments, including human health and ecological risk assessments, to include long-term progressive remediation goals would take place. We worked closely with them.

We did some early clean-up around there around some I guess we would want to call it low-hanging fruit that had to be done...

The synchro-lift down at the site right along the lake has been done; Hay River barge storage area, which is also along the waterfront down in Old Town; and eight Hay River water lots, leased lots along inner harbour, as well.

In total, with the $760 million that we are going to be leveraging with our portion and the federal portion, a significant amount of this is eligible for energy projects through the Northwest Territories, and we will be going through those specific details once we start getting into more detail of our applications around this money. There are also going to be other pots of money available for these sorts of things under the Pan-Canadian Framework for Clean Growth, and there will be an opportunity for energy projects in there.

As I stated, I think, earlier this week in the House, around the Low...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is correct. There is no funding for housing under the bilateral that we signed earlier this week with the federal Minister, but the federal government is going to be announcing other streams under the Investing in Canada plan that will provide funding for housing for the Northwest Territories. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I have said in this House before: I came from private business. I was there my whole life. I have done procurement with the Government of the Northwest Territories my whole life. I have bid on projects for various amounts from $1 to over $1 million. The BIP procurement policy protects northern businesses to a significant amount, but at the same time we are here to protect the public purse, and we will continue to do that. As a businessperson previous to being in this House, I believe the policy is there in a meaningful way to help protect us and give us a leg up, and I believe it is...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As the Premier said in the House previously, BIP was probably the best policy ever created by the Government of the Northwest Territories. BIP allows northern businesses and northern registered businesses that opportunity to give them that extra advantage on southern procurement of companies that are not BIP, and it is a significant amount that gives us leverage as the Northwest Territories to protect northern businesses.

I think this is early days yet. We get the assessments back to put a price tag on these. Once that comes in somewhere, I can share that with the Member.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources is working in company with the Department of Infrastructure to carry out environmental assessments on property formerly owned by NTCL. ENR has completed environmental assessments of the Government of the Northwest Territories' shipyard and marine terminal lots in Hay River.

The lots were assessed, including operating sites under Schedule 7 party to the Northwest Territories Land and Resources Devolution Agreement. These sites were a high priority for assessment. The final Phase I and II ESA report is due March 16, 2018...

The projects that we have lined up for 2018-2019, the Department of Infrastructure expects to prepare and submit to Infrastructure Canada early in this fiscal year.

The other thing I guess other Members maybe didn't realize is that, when we signed the agreement here on Wednesday, we were the very first ones in Canada to sign our bilateral agreement, so we are the first out of the gate. With that going forward, the projects that we want to do early in this coming fiscal year, we are going to have to come back for supplementary funding in the House in the May sitting for the projects that are...