Floyd Roland

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, let me reaffirm to the Member, and this House, and to the people of the Territories, that this government is not dealing willy-nilly with the finances of the Territories.

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We, in fact, have taken full responsibility for this and have accounted for it. In the future, working with the federal government, if our fiscal responsibility paper is adopted by them, that would give us much ability to look at how we deal with our finances.

Ultimately, yes, as a government, we do have to look at every time this occurs, and in most cases, it's much smaller...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, all funds that come through this government, through the Department of Finance, are voted on in the House. When we present our budget, we present the corporate taxes we receive, our own source revenues, and other fees and disbursements from the federal government. So it does come to this House; it is voted on, and how we spend that money then is also voted on. So it is taken into account. It's not like we have a separate account sitting on the side that nobody is aware of. All Members are made aware of our fiscal situation, the revenues we have coming...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it gives me pleasure to introduce someone in our gallery from Inuvik, Ms. Meeka Kisoun, with her baby.

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Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we can work on doing an information package that we can put out there. We can possibly look at what immediate ways we can get it out to the people, whether it is flyers or something like that. I think we have to, again, recognize the cost of getting information out there. I think we can look at trying to get a package out there that is fairly straightforward as to what the impacts are. The difference would be, now that we have changed the full cost recovery model where we are paying for the basic prices of product, the taxes that are applied to the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, in the area of petroleum products, notification was sent out to Members, and notification was given out to communities, that an increase was coming effective April 1st. That increase is a result of two things. First, we have gone to a full cost recovery model for pricing of products in communities. That means that the cost of delivering that product to a community is what is going to be charged at that community going forward. In the past, there was a different model used where some communities that had larger volume sales were offsetting the higher...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we can look at doing some information packages that would be done in the aboriginal language of the regions. Again, we are going to rely on a fair bit of support through community delivery agencies. We have passed information out there about the change. Obviously, that comes up short. We will look at what package we can put together. I am willing to discuss with Members what might be the best move in getting that information out, and work on it from that end of it. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, from the petroleum products division itself we are not providing any subsidies to individuals out there. There are a number of other programs within other departments that do help out people in the North. One is the seniors' fuel subsidy; another, through income support, possibly, would be a hardship allowance. Again, that is income tested.

What we have done in the petroleum products division is to try to offset the increased cost of home heating oil. Within our stabilization fund, there was enough funding there to lower the price or keep the price from...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it gives me pleasure to introduce and recognize somebody in the gallery, my constituency assistant, Dan, from Inuvik; Brenda Dillon; as well as also recognizing Mr. McLeod’s constituency assistant, Meeka Kisoun.

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Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As I stated in my opening comments, the initial surplus of the fund that we identified was $472,000. To help offset the increased price of product in communities, we’ve dipped into that fund and that’s the $230,000 we earmarked as a loss. We are offsetting the cost of home heating oil by 10 cents per litre in the communities we service. So in a way, we are trying to help those in the communities we service. We can only do this because we have that small surplus there. Once that surplus is gone, we are at the full cost of product price that will be charged in each...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, the estimates we have given there are based on the refuelling that has been done recently, so we have had our final communities refuelled through the barging system, and this already incorporates the new prices we paid for the winter resupply that had occurred previously. We feel that we are fairly close with that number.

The reason we are projecting the loss in the stabilization fund is to offset some of the increases on home heating oil. We are dipping into that stabilization fund so that we don't have to bring the price up as far as we would if we...