Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank my colleague the honourable Member from Kam Lake for the warm-up. My questions are to the Minister of Finance, and I am going to go down the same lines as it relates to my Member's statement on carbon taxation today. I appreciate the work that the Minister is doing, and especially with his federal counterparts, and I recognize that nothing is written in stone yet, and I certainly don't want to compromise any negotiations that are going on between the two governments. Can the Minister begin to tell us, at least, how he might be planning to structure the carbon tax revenue to help NWT residents and, in particular, businesses to transition into cleaner technologies? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you. Minister of Finance.
Yes, Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as I pointed out before, we have been doing some modelling. We have got a lot of feedback on our approach to carbon pricing and the effects it is going to have on the people of the Northwest Territories. I would prefer not to get into too much detail right now as to the work we are doing, because we have had discussions with committee. We need to have the discussions with the federal government, and I don't want to pre-empt or jeopardize any discussions that we might have. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I appreciate the difficult position that the Minister is in. It seems that we will maybe get some repetitive answers, but this is the nature of question period. I am going to put another one to the Minister as it relates to people that are of lower income, lesser income, sometimes a struggle with new forms of taxes. Let's get off what the deal is between the federal government and the territorial government, and just maybe ask the Minister what the Minister intends to do with any form of a newfound tax as it relates to lowering, the impacts it will have with folks with lower income levels. Will there be rebates or income assistance or what have you that will be available for these folks?
The federal government has come up with the carbon pricing. They have a federal backstop. I think the Member previous to you spoke on federal backstop and his non-support of it. If we went with the federal backstop, then the costs would be a lot higher. We are coming up with a made-in-the-North approach. That is going to look at a number of different groups across the Northwest Territories, and I assured the Member previous that we are going to do what we can, we will do what we can, to mitigate the effects of carbon pricing on all levels of people in the Northwest Territories. It is high on the radar of the Northern Premiers. They have had those discussions. We continue to have our discussions with Ottawa. In fact, I think I have just lined up a meeting for the end of the month with my federal counterpart, so we will continue to have those discussions.
Again, getting into the detail, once we have those discussions and I share the results of those discussions with committee, then we will be able to have more public dialogue on this issue.
One last question that I have for the Minister, then, today. It is a little bit relevant to what is going on between our two respective governments. More so, it is about investing in new technologies. I am just hoping that, at the end of the day, the Minister, this government, can commit to transformational investments that will really affect our ability to lessen the impacts on climate change and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Is the government looking at transformational-type change? Are they looking at things such as nuclear molten-salt reactors, and of course, connecting to the southern grid and providing much cheaper, affordable power to the North?
We are. The government is always looking at transformational projects and ways we can lower the high cost of doing business and living in the Northwest Territories. We continue to do that. I think the federal government has made it a priority of theirs, too. They have made a lot of investment in infrastructure across Canada, and the NWT has our proposals in to get our share of some of that funding. We are looking at a number of different projects that would help offset our greenhouse gas emissions and lower the cost of living. Again, as we go further into the process, I would be glad to keep committee updated as to the work we are going and seek their feedback.
Oral questions. Member for Yellowknife Centre.
