Caroline Wawzonek

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...

Thank you, Madam Chair. So, Madam Chair, you might recall there has been a revision to the fiscal responsibility policy where there is a commitment to indeed do more tracking and reporting throughout the course of the year with respect to where we're at on the fiscal responsibility policy. That right now will be expected to come out in the fall, which it normally hadn't been previously. So we can certainly look at if there's an opportunity to do that whenever there's an infrastructure sup. I don't think there's any barrier to doing so. But I will confirm and if I'm wrong in that, would advise...

Thank you, Madam Chair. So, Madam Chair, the federal government had indicated some you know, within for the last recent few years that they were going to be transitioning out of having the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation, and given that it is their act and their system, certainly seemed logical to anticipate and wait for them to indeed perform that – to complete what they said they were going to do. I think they were hoping for some other solutions. I can't say as to why they haven't moved faster or what they've done or not done or why they have done or not done it.

What I can say is we...

Thank you, Madam Chair. There's nothing extra in this. There is just shy of $19 million, though, in ECC's budget for fire suppression efforts this fiscal year. So obviously the efforts that have been undertaken already to fight that fire would have come out of that budget, and then with respect to the emergency evacuation and emergency response, I mean that, again, the EMO sits as well under MACA so certainly a lot of that would be expected at least to be fronted from there.

A large expense 90 percent of any Disaster Assistance Program monies would be refundable, but obviously that remains to...