Floyd Roland

There hasn’t been any time lines or discussion papers put in place. It has been a number of discussions at this point. I’d be prepared to get the material and the work that’s been done before and sit down with committee to go through what has been done and should we look at the opportunity. It depends on, for example, I understand the Dene leadership will do a motion on the subject, is my understanding. It depends on the results of that and the wishes of this Assembly as well.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I guess, first of all, the Power Corporation itself is not a part of that process. It is under the Executive branch that we’re doing this review on that piece. I’ve requested some time with committee to sit down and go over it. It is general in nature initially. We want to do the first phase as to what they’ve put on the table and get some more detail. In fact, the group will be meeting with a couple of the experts in the field coming up, so they can sit down with them to get further indication of what they would want to do. But it’s based on what the offer’s been put...

Those are good questions and the fact that we’ve provided initial correspondence to committee to sit down and have a discussion about this and questions of that nature are the areas that we are going to do an investigation on. Again, we want to sit down with committee. We want to go through this process and do that due diligence first before we start to deal with it in any further steps.

The Member has a number of times used language in this House that I guess to some degree would be insulting to the ability of the Cabinet elected by this Assembly.

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The simple fact that we work on initiatives together, we’ve put items out on the table, and, yes, Members are free to speak their mind, but sometimes there’s little fact to when they speak on the issues around the table. We put proposals on the table. The Member said he’s willing to work in a consensus style and let’s put the personalities aside. Yet again today he fires off with much more rhetoric than substance. The fact...

The business arrangements of ATCO and Northland Utilities and Dene Development Corporation is that they have an arrangement and we don’t have the detail to that. When it comes to dealing with the Dene Development Corporation itself on this matter sure, there’s no problems there. I’ll make the call.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We could probably get into a long orientation about the structure of this government when it first moved up from Ottawa to the Northwest Territories. The Westminster Style of government that this is based on, yes, we call it consensus for the way we share information and work with committees and that we don’t have political parties, but the structure of the operation of this House itself is still based on those fundamental principles of Westminster Style of governance. So that’s one of the fundamental pieces in place. We share information as we do through budget...

Mr. Speaker, the fact that when we sat down as Members of the Assembly looking at some of our initiatives and the impacts of those directions we want to go in and trying to secure areas, cost of living was a big one. That’s why we put an initiative committee behind that to try to deal with that. When it comes down to was there a meeting? I had been down to Calgary meeting with a number of groups and sat down with representatives of ATCO in their initial interest and felt that at that point we were not prepared to look at initiatives or anything but I’d be prepared to sit down with Members to...

Mr. Speaker, the fact is we are. The other motion is to have a look at the review of the Power Corporation, that is ongoing. Another piece of that is the discussion paper that has gone out to the public around energy generation regulation rates. The structure has gone out for public discussion as well. There are a number of pieces we are looking at. They are not totally isolated from one another. We felt at this point, with an offer on the table, that we should at least have a look at that offer to see what it might mean for the people of the Northwest Territories and ourselves as a government...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The relationship we have with aboriginal governments we take very seriously. In fact, that is why we’ve established the regional leaders meetings that we take part in with the grand chiefs and presidents of aboriginal government across the Territory. We have a joint ability to put items on the agenda. So those discussions and motions that are made are taken seriously. There are not all times we can agree with what’s put on the table. We let them know. But we continue to try to work on best efforts to strengthen our position from the Territory. Far too many times we find...

Mr. Speaker, the issue of the office building as the Member has raised here was debated during the infrastructure budget process. It did come up again this morning. When we were up in Inuvik, the Minister responsible informed the leadership that he was at the stage of going out to a public RP process and informed them today that, in fact, did go out just recently. We would be looking at what options are available, but the simple fact is this process has been out there for quite some time. In fact, both organizations put in unsolicited proposals and neither was accepted at that stage. The...