Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, want to join my colleagues in talking about the high energy cost situations in our small communities, which Mr. Krutko, the Member for Mackenzie Delta, alluded to.
I would like to talk about the concept of privatizing our corporation. We have a Crown corporation. There are a number of arguments that say: don’t privatize; don’t get into community ownership; we’re too small or we’re not well equipped to have a Crown corporation go into the private sector. I think that’s totally wrong. I think you have to give the ownership back to the people.
There are major corporations now in our communities and our regions that could look at having ownership. There is the Gwich’in Tribal Council; there’s the Sahtu Corporation, the Deh Cho, Akaitcho, and right down the valley into even ATCO, which has major operations in the field that go into Alberta. They have a number of plants in the Northwest Territories that operate services. They are out of another jurisdiction; however, they can provide cheaper power in the Northwest Territories.
We have a Crown corporation like the federal government. When they have Crown corporations and they’re in trouble, they sell them off. They’d sell them off to the people who could do better for our people in the Northwest Territories. I know there’s enough initiative going on that hopefully in the next year, the government will come back with some initiatives in terms of how we reduce the power.
Sometimes in the small communities we just want to know that our power rates will be stabilized and won’t go up any further. There are people in the Northwest Territories who get assistance from the federal government in terms of their power rates. We also receive that assistance through subsidies. Yet we’re told that these subsidies are going to grow every year, and if we don’t do something, it’s going to be costing us more and more.
As Members we have to start prioritizing what is more important: infrastructure or subsidies? How do we best serve our people? Mr. Speaker, I think the option is to seriously consider privatizing the Crown corporation; give the regional communities and individual corporations an opportunity to look and see if it’s feasible. If it’s not, then we certainly can have that further discussion. But I say give the power back to the people. We are the owners of the Power Corporation. Among us here, we represent the ownership, so I think we should have a further discussion on privatization.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The honourable Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
