Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In keeping with some of my colleagues’ talk about the cost of living today, I want to talk about power. This is something that’s been on the minds of many Northerners and this government in recent months, that’s for sure.
When knowledge of the unsolicited proposal came out, it sent the employees at NTPC into a state of wondering about their future. Mr. Premier came to Hay River and met with staff and management and communicated the GNWT plan as we were moving forward. Work is now proceeding on the electricity rate review as we attempt to wrap our thoughts around the challenges of delivering reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy to our residents and businesses. Residents and businesses in communities large and small, remote and urban, thermal and hydro, and definitely on a wide spectrum of differences, all of this to the backdrop of our constituents appealing to us, as legislators, about the high cost of living in the North. Our population decline must be partially related to the high cost of living, which necessarily includes the cost of power.
So the NTPC review is done. But it’s only one piece in a much larger puzzle. No review of NTPC or any search for potential efficiencies within that organization is going to be the entire answer to our high cost of power. We need to look at the whole issue of electricity regulation, generation, distribution and costs.
Power is an essential service. The GNWT, in some schizophrenic role in a bad movie here, actually plays all the main parts in this movie. The GNWT in some way either controls or owns the regulation, the rate levelizing, the generation, the distribution, and, to top it all off, they are the main customer as well. We take great pains to put ourselves at arm’s length from all of these processes. How much does this cost to put all of this at arm’s length? What is the added value of putting all these processes at arm’s length?
Enough studies, enough reviews. Let’s get to the most straightforward way to get affordable power to our residents.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Member for Tu Nedhe, Mr. Beaulieu.
