Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My Member’s statement was a little all over the map today, I just had so much to talk about, I’m trying to get it all out there in the first day, but I’m going to try to cut back a little bit and just be a little more methodical about this now.
I’d like to ask the Premier – he’s talked about devolution, we’ve talked a lot about devolution. We’ve talked a lot about devolution in terms of jobs and the resource revenue proceeds from the resources that leave the Northwest Territories. The bigger picture has got to come to play in the fact that we will have more control, but people need to understand what more control means.
Let’s use the Taltson Hydro Dam expansion as an example. How will devolution, after it is implemented, help us move projects like that ahead that benefit regions of the Northwest Territories like the South Slave? We’ve talked about it for so long, but how will that be a real benefit for us when devolution is in place? Thank you.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Premier, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are obviously very much looking forward to devolution, because as we’ve said many times, it will bring control and decision-making into our hands. Obviously, energy and our hydro development are first and foremost in our minds. We’ve been working very hard in putting together our Energy Plan, and also our NWT Power Corporation is working on a Hydro Development Strategy that we hope to be rolling out very soon.
When the Prime Minister was in Hay River I talked to him very specifically about hydro development and about the fact that even with devolution we still will be hampered or hamstrung by a borrowing limit imposed on our government. In order to be able to achieve our lofty visions of increasing our transmission lines, tying in all of our hydro energy together, we need to find a way so that the borrowing limit is not a hindrance. We’re so confident in our plans and our vision that we think we can do it using our own resources, as long as we’re not restricted.
Minister Miltenberger was in Hay River last week when he was doing a tour on how resource revenues would be spent, and he talked about it at that time. So we’re very bullish. We think hydro is a very good investment, especially developing the Taltson to its full potential. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, the Premier speaks of our borrowing limit and how that sometimes restrains us. In the past when we talked about projects like the Taltson Hydro expansion, we also talked about public funds combined with private investment, to see something like this go ahead. I was involved in those discussions. It seemed like a lot of that expansion kind of got all mixed in with transmission lines over the East Arm of Great Slave Lake and transmitting hydro to the diamond mines and so on. There was a real interest from the private sector in investing in the expansion of the Taltson Dam and I would like to know if that’s still on the radar. Thank you.
Thank you. I think our thinking is becoming very clear. We are going to focus on expansion of transmission lines. Also, we feel we need the benefit of some of the businesspeople in the Northwest Territories, some of the people that have been around, very experienced businesspeople that we can work with and that can give us some advice on innovative ways to be able to finance and develop the hydro potential.
Also, when we talked to the Prime Minister he didn’t say no, which we thought was a very good response, but he did indicate that we needed to have a very clear business case and also that we needed to have a very well-developed plan. We will be investing so that we can do both of those things. I think that as we go forward, we expect to have a very good plan and strategy that we’ll be rolling out in the next few months. Thank you.
Again, not so many years ago we did have a business in Alberta that is very informed with respect to the development of energy and hydro, and we could never seem to advance that discussion as far as we wanted to. We had an unsolicited proposal from ATCO, out of Alberta, to partner with us to expand the Taltson. They’ve got money; they’ve got experience. One of the concerns at the time was that we didn’t have the capacity on our side of the table to negotiate something that people thought would be fair for the Northwest Territories.
Do we have that capacity now and could we still be looking at some kind of a joint venture that would bring that kind of financial resource to a project like this so that we could get it off the ground? My comment at the time always was as the Northwest Territories we can own 100 percent of nothing or we can own 50 percent of something. Thank you.
Thank you. I think the Member hit it right on the head. In the past whenever we wanted to develop our hydro resources, the companies that we were talking to always wanted us to take all of the risk and then they would take most of the power. I think that with the plan that we’re developing, we need to find a way to transport the power first. We want to bring the power to where the development will be happening so that we can promote development.
There’s a potential for nine new mines in the Northwest Territories by 2020 and invariably every one of them wants cheaper power. We’re also talking with our colleagues south of us, Saskatchewan, Alberta, BC, who are very interested in power. For example, Saskatchewan, to tie into Taltson, it’s only 119 kilometres away. So we’d only need to build a transmission line of that magnitude.
So we think that by finding a way to get the power to the people, to the companies and projects that need it, also the ability to sell the power when we have surplus power so that we can make money while we’re doing that as well. So we’re working on a technical study and developing our business case, and we think that it’s a very significant opportunity for the Northwest Territories. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Mrs. Groenewegen.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to thank the Premier for that answer. It’s a win-win for everybody. It has the potential to offset the high cost of living in the North. It has the potential to be the impetus for development in these mining operations that the Premier refers to. I hope that the Premier will really run with this and keep us apprised.
We need a development like the Taltson expansion in the South Slave. We need something. We need devolution to mean something for our people.
Will the Premier take up this particular project with his Cabinet colleagues and report back to us on significant progress in the near future? Thank you.
Thank you. Very pleased with the support, and we see this hydro development and the transmission line as probably the biggest project that we can start in the next two years, or in the remaining life of this 17th Assembly. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.
