Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am just going to follow up to my Member’s statement. I will have questions for the Minister of Housing in regard to how we can mitigate the use of our gas consumption in the Inuvik region. We are throwing money at this problem, which we should be looking at how we can do some prevention, promotion and increase that wealth if we are also keeping the cost low for our residents.
My first question is to the Minister of Housing. How many of our housing units are currently on natural gas or the synthetic gas system? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. The honourable Minister responsible for the NWT Housing Corporation, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have 240 public housing units in Inuvik and all 240 of them are all on natural gas or SNG. That would include the boilers and the hot water heaters. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, that is a high number of residents that are consuming the synthetic gas at the moment at a very high cost. Any residents that are private or in a market rent area, they are paying a pretty high cost right now, which I think in turn puts a high cost on this government when we talk about deferred maintenance and other projects where other dollars could go.
Can the Minister confirm that there has been an increase in the costs from when Inuvik went from natural gas to synthetic gas last year over the period of two or three months? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, I do know that for the month of January of 2012 the local housing authority spent approximately $84,000 for natural gas. A year later, January 2013, that cost went up to $181,000 and that is just for the month of January, and you multiply that over 12 months, we spent over $1 million. I think it is $572,000 more than we would normally spend because of the conversion to SNG. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, that is a significant increase that the government is paying to subsidize these housing units. I just want to ask the Minister if there is a way to mitigate that. Would the Minister look at possibly… Well, even before that, the road was shut down recently due to some weather conditions. I know we did put money into the ferry system to prolong the opening of the road. Should the road close down again or the ferry system, something happens to it and we do run out, we don’t have storage for synthetic gas or the natural gas well runs out, what would the cost be to convert all of these houses back to either diesel or to a biomass product? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, the Department of Transportation has committed to trying to keep the ferry crossing at Tsiigehtchic opened for as long as possible, where there is no interruption in service, so that would be a huge help.
However, in the event that something does happen, we have to deal with it then. I do know that it will cost the NWT Housing Corporation and this government approximately $5 million to convert all our units back to diesel in the event that we have to. It’s not something that we would like to do. We would like to work with, obviously, the community and the suppliers to keep a continuous flow going so we don’t have to convert back over.
As far as the biomass part of it, we are exploring all options for biomass. I do know that in some of the new projects we have coming on stream, not particularly in Inuvik, but we are putting biomass systems into those units so we will see how they work. If there are opportunities in Inuvik to convert some of our multi-unit type buildings to biomass, obviously we have to look at that, especially with the concern with the supply of gas. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Moses.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I know there is a lot of work being done on this situation. I think this government should also take a lead role, not only by supplying funding dollars but look at ways we can regulate or mitigate the consumption that some of our housing units are using in the synthetic gas. It would decrease the costs and that can go into deferred maintenance or even housing repairs.
Does the Minister have any kind of campaign in place that might be able to tell the residents in the housing units on their energy consumption so that we can prolong that well until we find a longer solution? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, I know, through the LHO, they put out a newsletter every so often. I have been advised that they are going to put a campaign in there as to the consumption of gas. However, that is a hard one to regulate, to tell people that they need to reduce their consumption. I think they all realize, especially those in the private homes. They’re probably all turning their thermostats down a bit to conserve.
As I’ve seen and as the Member is aware, we were dealing with a situation where a senior who owned their own home went from $700 a month to $1,400 a month and they’ve taken every step they could to try and mitigate some of the usage.
So it’s a difficult situation the community of Inuvik is in right now. All the agencies are working together to try to find a solution, and hopefully we can find a solution soon.
But as far as Housing goes, we’ll do what we can to make sure that our tenants are informed, advised and ready. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
