Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to follow up on some comments and some questions asked by my colleague Mr. Hawkins on the rebate, a possible rebate for oil tanks. Before I do that I just want to applaud the Minister of ENR and his department for putting in the public awareness campaign on oil leaks. I think it’s quite a good campaign and I think they did a wonderful job. I also want to mention that in his response to Mr. Hawkins, the Minister indicated that we are investing a lot of money in alternative energy as a way to get off of oil, which I also think is great, but I think it’s important to remember that a lot of people have bought boilers or furnaces that operate on oil and they all have a lifecycle and the lifecycle for an oil furnace or an oil burner is significantly longer than that for an oil tank and these oil tanks are leaking on a more regular basis. We really want people who haven’t lived through the lifecycle of their furnaces to keep their oil tanks new and fresh so that we don’t experience leaks. So I think it’s important that we follow Mr. Hawkins’ recommendation and put in some rebate, but I’d like to encourage the Minister to consider, in doing that, rather than providing a rebate for replacing a single walled tank with a single walled tank, which is exasperating the problem, to consider looking at rebates for the higher quality tanks, the double walled tanks or the tanks with alarms, those type of things rather than just a rebate for putting in the same problem again and again and again. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. The honourable Minister responsible for Environment and Natural Resources, Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I agree with the Member that we want people to have the best failsafe products that are out there. I understand in Europe they do things considerably in a more advanced fashion than we do. The issue of double wall tanks, tanks with alarms to me only make good sense. I agree we don’t want to just replace a cheesy single walled tank with a new cheesy single walled tank. Thank you.
Thank you. So I don’t think we heard the Minister say yes, I think we heard the Minister say that he is going to explore the possibilities. I just want to suggest to the Minister that right now if he was to do some pricing to go get a double walled tank or a tank with one of the alarms in it installed, it’s going to cost you over $4,000 to install, whereas if you want to put in one of the bad tanks and replace one of the bad tanks with a bad tank it’s going to cost you about $1,000. So I’d like to encourage the Minister to have his department go out and do some additional research into the costing of these options and, once again, to not only suggest that they look into it, but possibly agree to put in some level of a rebate to encourage those individuals to consider the quality tanks that are going to avoid leaks in the future.
Thank you. I committed to the Member for Yellowknife Centre that we’d look at this and the timeline he suggested we agreed to, which is this coming fall to have something that would lay out and put a frame around this issue. I’d also point out that if we’re going to be spending that many thousands of dollars to replace a tank to keep a boiler going and then the boiler goes but you’ve bought this brand new $4,000 tank so you spend another $10,000 to replace the boiler, that we’ll be in a cycle that we’ll never get out of. We’re going to have to look at the cost comparison across the type of appliances and if we’re serious about looking at alternative energy, that will be part of our consideration so that we’re not just investing money because we’re in a cycle we can’t get out of with diesel equipment. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. The honourable Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
