Floyd Roland

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am pleased to advise Members of the Legislative Assembly that His Royal Highness Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton will visit the Northwest Territories this coming July as part of their royal tour of Canada.

---Applause

Yesterday, officials from the Department of Canadian Heritage contacted the Government of the Northwest Territories to advise us that the royal couple was specifically interested in visiting our Territory while they are in Canada. We were delighted to hear of their interest in the NWT and certainly look forward to welcoming them this summer.

Det...

If the Member could help set up communications with the community, I would gladly speak to the chair of the Power Corporation and inform him of our discussions here and a commitment to have an initial discussion about what it would take and what’s required to move this forward. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I seek unanimous consent to return to item 3.

---Unanimous consent granted

Again, I know from the Power Corporation side on the energy distribution and working with Imperial Oil, that that work is ongoing. From an overall Government of the Northwest Territories perspective, when this issue first came to our attention, a number of departments were pulled together to look at what needed to be done and the alternatives that could be looked at, and some of the initial work was to convert some of our larger buildings to diesel so that there would be less of a draw on the natural gas supply that was remaining, to allow a longer transition period. There hasn’t been a...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The issue of the natural gas situation in Norman Wells has been one we’ve been working on as the Government of the Northwest Territories in a number of fashions. The Power Corporation itself has recently had a meeting with the mayor and council of Norman Wells to discuss some of the work that’s ongoing and concerns with outages and so on and the distribution of power. They’ve also engaged in the work that’s going on for the conversion to either diesel or another form of energy in the community. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s been such a long time since I’ve done a Member’s statement, I thought I’d recognize the two young ladies who have been Pages here down from my constituency of Inuvik Boot Lake. We have Pages Meagan Ross and Paisley Day. I have to thank Mr. Robert C. McLeod’s constituency assistant who has travelled down as their chaperone and has been helping them as they help us do our job here in the House. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m informed that the Town of Hay River, the council, has a working group between the Town, Imperial and, I believe, another firm, Global Technical Services, looking at their operations. We’d have to go to them to see what alternatives they may be looking at. Thank you.

The specific area there would be one that is more directed between the community itself and Esso, as Esso right now is the generator and the Power Corporation is the distributor of that energy. We are directly involved in that work going towards conversion and we’d have to look at alternatives, depending on what the community would decide. I would have to get more up to speed on that. I know that the Power Corporation, the CEO and the staff who were at the meeting are aware of the concerns and I’ll look to them to see the work they’re engaged in. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, the identification and the categorization of waste sites, those were decisions made by previous governments that, as I said, the preliminary work was done. Quite clearly, we leave the responsibility for decisions made by the federal government prior to the signing of the final agreement is their responsibility needing to go forward, but they still have to share that work with us and come up with a budget that we would have to negotiate on dealing with the full remediation of those sites or that they would remain holding onto the liability of those sites. For example, by signing...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member’s statement earlier, leading up to these questions, made a number of comments about secret negotiations and so on. I will say for the record that there were no secret negotiations. All bilateral discussions that may have happened between the GNWT and the federal government, specifically because there are areas that we clearly are for or would be, those issues and discussions were shared at the main table with all of the partners that were at the table.

As for signing this agreement, there are many things to be negotiated as we go forward. One of those is the...