David Ramsay

Madam Chair, that won’t change our contributions to the Northern Frontier Visitors Association at all. We will continue to fund them to the level that you see in the budget. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I believe it’s subject to the program review currently, so it’s inactive. Thank you.

There are some great opportunities and the Member has a good suggestion. We currently don’t have a half a million extra dollars here, so it’s a bit hypothetical at this point, but certainly the money would be put to good use and we will be working with the Members, through committee, to find out where the best investment would be made with that money. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That comes under the purview of the board and, certainly, I appreciate the Member bringing that to my attention. I have the opportunity to meet with the board quite often. Actually, I just met with them last week and I’d be more than happy to raise the concern the Member brings on the number of managers in the organization to the board, and I’ll get her a response from the board after I meet with them. Thank you.

Madam Chair, yes, and it’s this fiscal year, not next fiscal year. At the very earliest opportunity, I am sure, through MECC, we will bring the Energy Plan through committee, share it with committee sometime before the next session in May. We will get that there. We’ll have this discussion and I think it’s going to be a very good discussion. The plan is going to be multi-year. Obviously, some of the bigger projects would require large investments and be carried out over multiple years. There will obviously be some smaller things that could happen in the near term over one or two years.

This...

Thanks, Mr. Chairman. If the Member could just restate his question, I missed the first part of it.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The remaining $400,000 would be for medium- and long-term energy options for Inuvik at $100,000, a water monitoring program in Kakisa for $50,000, and the Whati T-line completion of regulatory application for $250,000.

We’d be more than happy once this gets complete, hopefully sometime this spring, and that we’ll get it to the Executive Council and share it with Members. I think it’s going to be very, very telling. Some of the preliminary numbers I’ve seen – and I know the Member was there at the readiness session and when we met with the chamber of commerce and business leaders in the Sahtu after that session – if you had 10 wells there what it would translate into straight up economic opportunity and it’s tremendous what would happen there.

What has to happen is the development has to be done in a...

Thank you. I’m sure our staff have talked to the staff at ECE and that dialogue will have to continue. I think getting the message into schools around the Northwest Territories is very important, and we will continue to work with ECE to make sure that any programs that we do have, any educational component reaches out to schools and young people across the Northwest Territories. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The issue that Mr. Dolynny brings up is a good one. I think it’s a discussion that all Members probably should have. From my perspective, we stand up as Ministers and if a department’s falling down in an area or has questions in an area, we answer that on the floor of the House or through the business plans. That has been the process. It’s been political, questions asked, issues addressed through the department and that goes down through the corporate management of the department to whatever manager or director is responsible for a certain area. If we want to delve a...