Caroline Wawzonek

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I have on my left Mr. Bill MacKay, deputy minister of Finance. And on my right, Terence Courtoreille, the deputy secretary to the financial management board.

Madam Chair, that has actually been in fact, calculated. Ask and you shall receive. $1.1 million approximately in terms of the transportation and accommodations to accommodate the need for those who had to travel for birth. Thank you.

Yes, I do. Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair. I am here to present the Supplementary Estimates (Operations Expenditures), No. 1, 20232024.

The operations supplementary estimates propose a total increase of $103.952 million of which $21.6 million will be offset by revenues from the Government of Canada and $48.4 million is offset by appropriations lapsed in 20222023.

The operations supplementary estimates propose the following expenditures:

$48.4 million to continue to undertake flood recovery activities across the NWT;

$15.2 million in subsidies to address electrical rate pressures for NWT...

Thank you, Madam Chair. This is for the current fiscal year 20232024, and it is intended to help support the funding of an additional five positions as well as some additional actually 6.25 positions, if you will, is how it's termed, Madam Chair. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, a big part of what we tried to do with this program was to make it easy to apply and then easy to get the money out. So, again, that is another one of the reasons when you look at one of the forms online, it's online fillable, and it's looking for proof of income, income disruption, but we're not asking people to start going and tracking down documents that they might not have had, particularly if the evacuation had lasted longer. So there's provisions in there to speak to their income disruption but not asking for a lot of difficult paperwork. And once they can fill that form out...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I can say that there should be an options paper available in some I mean, I don't yeah, I'm calling it an options paper. There will be something available to committee by tomorrow, which is indeed the deadline that was set. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there's a few issues in there. I think I've caught them all.

First of all, Mr. Speaker, we're not Alberta. They were dealing with less than one percent of their population that was forced to be evacuated. We were looking at almost 10 percent of the population in the Northwest Territories being evacuated. And, Mr. Speaker, I know folks are looking at Alberta. I suspect folks in British Columbia were looking at Alberta, as were folks in Saskatchewan looking at Alberta, and even Nova Scotia might, frankly, be looking at us because they were offering, at last...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, that's correct.

Thank you, Madam Chair. This is onetime finding to solve the problem for now. Madam Chair, I'm not going to pretend that the challenges of high fuel costs and rates are necessarily going away today, but there is another application in that is that is working its way through and that may help to provide some relief going forward. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, one of the other things done under the umbrella of the fish revitalization strategy was work on marketing, was work on understanding the market for fish, and consistently it has come back that there indeed is a very strong market for freshwater fish and for the kind of product that's available here in the Northwest Territories, that it is a distinct and unique product. Geopolitically with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that price only increased and the demand only increased. So we're at a moment in time here right now that we very much would like to be able...