Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question today is for the Minister of DOI to better understand the MTS 2017 sailing season. My first question is: how many tugboats did MTS deploy and what were the volumes of fuel and cargo hauled? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Minister of Infrastructure.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First of all, I want to congratulate the Department of MTS on the first sailing season of the Mackenzie River and the Arctic Coast. It was a challenge to get that going, but they did a great job.
I can gladly update the House that the Marine Transportation Division reactivated six tugboats this last season. We delivered 37 million litres of diesel fuel, gasoline, jet fuel, and carried more than 10,000 tonnes of cargo freight to the communities for industry clients, which included construction materials, pre-fabricated housing units, heavy equipment vehicles, and consumer goods. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you to the Minister for providing that information. Moving along to see how our new company is doing, here. On the issue and previous discussions, there was the establishment of a marine training facility in Hay River. How many Northerners were trained at that facility?
The previous marine training was run out of the Hay River Friendship Centre. I don't have those exact numbers, but I would like to update the House that the federal government announced just as of February 2nd that MTS, working alongside with us and Nunavut Fisheries and Marine Training Consortium, have established an announcement where they're going to establish a marine training facility in Hay River, and this will be coming. There was a press release announced by the federal government that they are working particularly with the Nunavut Fisheries and Marine Training Consortium, who already does this sort of thing in the Nunavut side of the territory. They will be working closely with us and our government to set up a facility in Hay River to be able to address the ongoing needs of people in the fishing industry and the people in the marine side of things in the Northwest Territories.
I'm glad to hear that we're providing benefits with this new acquisition that happened last year and the operations of last summer. My next question is related to, aside from training the workforce, the workforce itself. How many of the workforce were northern NWT residents?
One of the challenges, when we bought these assets moving forward, was to get everything up and running. A part of that would be the HR side of it. On the HR side of it, there was a number of agreements that were in place that had to be renegotiated and MOUs put in place for a collective bargaining unit, so we had to deal with three different types of operations: the Canadian Merchant Service Guild, the Seafarers' International Union of Canada, and the Public Service Alliance of Canada.
Through that, we hired a company called ORSI who facilitated hiring our HR for staffing up the marine side of things. I'm glad to say that we had 141 employees at peak, and out of that, 60 of them were from the Northwest Territories.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Sahtu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My last question is, I want to ensure that the continuation of this operation is being done so that our remote communities in Sahtu could be ensured that we're getting our supplies and dry goods and particularly fuel. In the future operations from last year, is there a financial stability from the earnings of this previous summer's operations, and if the Minister will provide that in a summary of operations financially to this side? Thank you.
As the Member is aware, we've set up a revolving fund to ensure the continuation and operation of this. We will have our first year under our belt. When we have our financial statements done for the year, we will gladly update committee on the first sailing season of MTS. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Frame Lake.
