Bob Bromley

That’s all I have. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to pursue this a little bit further. I appreciate the good information here. That was useful.

I guess I’m also looking at it for rate. For example, new litres of fossil fuel saved and the new greenhouse gas reductions by year for the past five years, so that I can see how much of the low-hanging fruit or whatever it is. Ultimately, the cost-benefit return probably starts to shrink a little bit. I would appreciate that to help me assess that, which brings me to the question.

What do we see as our biggest remaining opportunities? I’d say we are close to achieving...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just have a quick one on the recoveries. I noticed ’13-14 for other public agencies is roughly triple of the previous year. Is that associated with the taking on of Stanton, or is there another explanation for that?

I’ll leave that for now, but I believe there is a difference between a National Building Code and a National Energy Code.

I’d like to just ask what role Public Works and Services has played in establishing a new market for wood pellet energy in thermal communities where they didn’t exist before, through the establishment of territorial infrastructure that demands wood pellet energy. Are there any cases that we can point to where we have achieved that? I know the work we do in switching here has been very important in that respect, but I’d like to know what communities that didn’t have that...

I appreciate that information and commitment. I think the Minister and deputy minister have got where I’m coming from and I’d appreciate that information. What’s the Environmental Liabilities Fund? I’m afraid I’m ignorant of that. Is it just within this department or is it a government-wide fund? Where does it lodge itself? How much is it?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the work being done by my colleagues here. This motion asks for the government to initiate discussions with the Government of Canada on the Mackenzie Valley Highway into the Sahtu. It asks us to begin working a lot more seriously on capacity building so that we can nail down benefits from development activities. That’s a start. Obviously, this is only a start and I hope that as we get into assessing what the impacts are and what the responses need to be, and we need to get on this, we need to think about some of the hard, cold realities that are coming out...

I’ll help the Minister remember that. I guess my last one is with general procurement policies and practices. We have the opportunity to have a green element. In fact, we are bringing that lens to our own work now and enjoying, as the Minister reported today in his opening remarks, some significant savings.

Will this Minister work to get the environmental aspect into our general procurement practices so that when we’re asking for something to be done, an important element in the RFP is the environmental practices. An efficient product, how will greenhouse gases be handled in terms of mitigation...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I agree with the Minister. We want to do this properly, we want to do it quickly, and we want to do is safely. How can we do that when we’re nickel and diming this project?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I had questions, too, on contracting and procurement. Certainly, there is a very high rate of sole-sourced contracting. I believe it’s close to 25 percent; almost 50 percent when we throw in negotiated contracts.

The last time we looked at these processes, I discovered some shabby processes. For example, two contracts with identical work were issued to two different providers with, again, identical reasons, that reason being there’s only one contractor to provide the work. Obviously, that’s not satisfactory and I think there’s been some work done since then.

There are...

Thank you. Thanks to our fiscal procrastination we are now passing the point of completing a half-life retrofit on this asset.

The Minister of Finance commented publicly that we need to spend $200 to avoid replacing the hospital for $500 million, but I’m sure everyone here will agree that’s very much lowballing the estimate of these costs. Many suspect our procrastinated renovation may be pushing toward 300 and 400 million dollars in the billable amount, the longer we wait and current proposals are again nickel and diming. You’re stretching this out over decades, despite the Minister’s...