Bob Bromley

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Has there been a community or location chosen yet for the smart grid part of that, do we know?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thanks to the Minister. I also did speak to the CEO and he expressed extreme frustration with the department. I am sure there are frustrations on both sides. I would ask the Minister to direct his staff to get down to it and just getting to it. Will the Minister commit to getting those dollars out the door early in the next fiscal year for early childhood development? Thank you.

That’s all the questions I had.

Thanks for those comments. I remain concerned about the $125,000 that had been allocated for the Family Resource Centre in Ndilo, apparently very recently because it’s year end. Ten of the 12 months have passed when those dollars were finally allocated. I’m concerned about the effectiveness of those dollars that are being spent for the last few weeks. So I’d like to know from the Minister, what is being done to ensure that those dollars are spent effectively, particularly given this situation this year. Mahsi.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to talk a little bit about the Inuvik and Norman Wells situations. I know we’ve supported work to look at biomass solutions. I’ve heard the past mayor interviewed on the radio during the recent emergency in Norman Wells extolling the opportunities of biomass in Norman Wells and the Minister has told me that the long-term feasibility of biomass in Inuvik is good. Right now, I don’t see anything in here that follows up on all of those opportunities. What are we doing to move to those?

We could obviously pursue the liquid natural gas routes and other natural gas routes...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to recognize Rick Edjericon, a resident of Weledeh and chair of the besieged Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board. I don’t know if he’s still there – I can’t see behind me, Mr. Speaker – but Willard Hagen, the chair of the about-to-be redesigned Mackenzie Valley Land and Water Board. Mahsi.

Are we able to speak to the motion in Committee of the Whole? Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Once again the opportunity here is clear. I am aware that this opportunity, with such short payback time, has been proposed by the Arctic Energy Alliance in the past, and I’ve drawn on some of their analysis to make my comments. I have commented on some of this already, so I won’t repeat that.

I will note there have been a couple of changes since that work. First of all, the government now subsidizes more of the energy consumed than they used to and that’s because we’ve taken the cap from an average of 700 to...

Thank you once again for that commitment from the Minister. I think it has been very frustrating as far away as Sachs Harbour where energy is so costly and people have taken action there and then found out after things were in place that they couldn’t afford to do it, to literally hook it up. So the facility sits there.

I’d like now to turn to our general renewable energy, energy efficiency programs. It’s no surprise to this Minister or this government that committee has wanted to see a major effort and expenditure in the energy area. We see huge opportunities for addressing many, again, of our...

It will be really great to see this get off the ground. We’ve been looking at it for some time. I’m happy that real progress is being made here.

My last one on the recycling aspect is, I still have people coming to me and really saying, you know, why will Cabinet not put down the price that they have to pay for milk containers in relation to what they get back. We do not want to raise the price of milk and this Minister has insisted on doing that. This obviously goes against our greater government goals of helping people and so on. Milk and the equivalent soy products are known to be really...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My thinking is in line with many of the comments that have been brought up. Certainly on the fracking side of things I guess I would like to note that we did learn a lot on the trip that ITI sponsored for committee. Unfortunately, despite being shepherded about by industry, none of this committee, to my knowledge, has ever visited a frack site. So we still have a tremendous amount to learn.

I would say what we do know is that there is some very, very nasty stuff that routinely is both put into the ground and much more very, very nasty stuff is brought up from the ground...