Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question is for the Minister of Housing.
I appreciated his Minister’s statement on the EnerGuide 80 Program — very progressive. The one thing I noticed is that it’s actually for implementation in 2010. Everybody knows a dollar saved is a dollar earned. The same goes for greenhouse gas submissions. Why can’t we get going and get some of this implemented this coming year?
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The honourable Minister responsible for the NWT Housing Corporation, Mr. Michael McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We just recently decided to move forward on this initiative. We still have a lot of work to do in terms of design and engineering reviews and things of that nature. This is probably something we could fast track, but we felt that in order to do a good job, we needed the time that we’ve allotted for our people to be able to dedicate adequate resources to it.
I thank the Minister for those comments. I realize that’s probably a prudent approach, but I think the opportunity is there for at least some. Again, I’m not suggesting that we try and do this for every house. This is not new technology; it’s off the shelf. This was adopted a couple years ago by the City of Yellowknife. There’s lots of expertise available in this area. As the Minister has noted, other provincial and municipal jurisdictions have been doing this across the country. There’s not much engineering work that’s required here. This is really off the shelf.
I’d just like to encourage or see if I could get the Minister to commit to implementation to some degree this coming building season, 2009. I don’t think it’s too big of a task.
Mr. Speaker, the Member is right; we’re not here to try and invent anything new. There is a lot of stuff that’s off the shelf.
We want to take the time for our staff to be able to evaluate the best techniques that are out there. We want to be able to see what’s happening in other jurisdictions. We’ve already embarked on that. We have a general idea, but we need to be able to do further investigations and see what works best and what works best in the Northwest Territories. We’ve got to remember there is also a cost factor incorporated in going into this new design. We have to be able to analyze that and see how we are going to accommodate that concern.
Thanks to the Minister for those comments. I recognize those situations.
Again, I think there is an opportunity here to save the taxpayer some dollars, to save the environment some greenhouse gas emissions. I think we heard the Minister of Human Resources talking earlier about how we want to develop a good working relationship with our employees and so on. I think challenges are something, especially for good causes, that our employees really react to.
Here’s a situation. The environment is on lot of folks’ minds, especially young engineers. The Minister’s noted big gains that could be achieved with some of the renovations, upgrades. Surely some of those things could be put in place in the 2009 season and actually put in place in a way that would test some of these things. As the Minister noted, we’re going to need to learn what works in the North. There’s no better way than trying them out in the North.
Do you have a question, Mr. Bromley?
Would you commit to doing this in 2009?
Mr. Speaker, we will commit. I know the Member is very eager to see these new initiatives starting to play in, and we’ll commit to doing something as soon as we can.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final short supplementary, Mr. Bromley.
Nothing further. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko.
