Floyd Roland

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there are a number of procurement policies that we do have within the government: sole source is one of them, negotiated contracts is another, and public tender process is the one we use most commonly. In this case, it wasn’t the staff on the ground in the community who made that decision. They provided the information to headquarters here and, from that information, it was brought forward to me that they were proceeding to make that decision based on the information that they had in hand. That decision could be made here in headquarters and that is...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, in the community the Member is speaking about, there was a search done to see what would have been available in that community for these offices that we are looking for. One of the conditions we have is it has to meet a certain standard. The other business the Member is referring to did not, from what I am being informed, have the adequate space available to meet what was being requested. It was on that basis that we made the decision to proceed with doing a sole source to one company.

I am prepared to sit with the Member and go over this file if he feels...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, last February, I introduced a fiscal strategy that took the necessary steps to ensure the ongoing fiscal sustainability of our government. This meant taking strong action to reduce spending while still making the necessary investments to help us achieve the goals and objectives set out in our strategic plan.

The cornerstone of our fiscal strategy was the introduction of the fiscal responsibility policy. Simply stated, the policy requires us to continually monitor expenditures to ensure we achieve the necessary cash surpluses from operations to finance 50...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, the stabilization fund, as it's set up, would not address community-by-community specifics. What we would look at doing, as we have done in this case, is to look at the total amount of the product cost and how much of an impact that would have. We set an across-the-board 10-cent reduction in the price of home heating oil. So in each community it isn’t set at a flat rate, either. The cost of that product to get to that community is 100 percent cost recovery as we go forward here. Every community would pay for the price of the product, the shipping and...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, the contractual arrangements we have for dispensing of fuel in the communities is done on a community-by-community basis and seeing who would be interested when we put these packages out for response from the public. The fund isn’t set up to affect the price of those contracts for delivery. What the fund is there to do is mitigate the increase that we would have to go forward with if the price of the product has climbed as much as it has. From last winter’s resupply through to this summer, there’s been a drastic increase in the price of product. By...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The stabilization fund is to do what we just spoke of, to try to offset some of the sharp increases. As well, it can provide for decreases in prices if there was surplus there. The way we are going now, we would find if we kept up the practice that we had in the past, we would be in a deficit position of close to $1 million if we didn’t make some of the changes that we had in the last year. Because of the act and direction given of full cost recovery, we would have to come in for some drastic increases. These latest increases are part of a result of going full cost...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, this section is dealing with special provisions that were in the federal legislation that we had mirrored. Federal legislation has removed that section and now we are just following up and removing that from ours. There were never any special provisions for trappers under the federal Income Tax Act. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, higher fuel costs are a concern for northerners and a concern for this government. As Minister of Finance today, I would like to provide some detail about how our tax system affects fuel pricing.

The GNWT does not set or regulate the price of gas or other fuel products. The petroleum products division supplies 15 NWT communities on a full-cost recovery basis but does not set the initial price.

There is no GNWT tax on home heating fuel.

There is no GNWT tax on natural gas.

There is no GNWT tax on propane, whether it is used to heat homes or power...

Yes, I would like to have my witnesses present.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I’ll do that right now. I’ll apologize for the department in dealing with employees. We have timelines, we set our goals high to try to meet those timelines and, unfortunately, because of the work we’ve done around the corporate human resource service centres and pulling the staff together, some of the files have had to sit a little bit until we’ve had the staff in their new positions to deal with that. As well, as I was saying, because of this and pulling everybody in under one roof, it’s become much clearer now that there have been many files that...