Jane Groenewegen

Mr. Speaker, the Premier speaks of our borrowing limit and how that sometimes restrains us. In the past when we talked about projects like the Taltson Hydro expansion, we also talked about public funds combined with private investment, to see something like this go ahead. I was involved in those discussions. It seemed like a lot of that expansion kind of got all mixed in with transmission lines over the East Arm of Great Slave Lake and transmitting hydro to the diamond mines and so on. There was a real interest from the private sector in investing in the expansion of the Taltson Dam and I...

Thank you, Mr. Nadli. Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s a pleasure to be back here in the Legislative Assembly. It seems like we were gone for a long time.

Mr. Speaker, today I wanted to just touch on a few items related to devolution. The Premier has highlighted some of these benefits in his sessional statement that he just provided. He’s talked about jobs and he’s talked about the control of land and water and resources. I think we need to keep our eye on the big picture here. The revenues from royalties and the positions that will transfer to the North are, of course, a wonderful benefit and we’d like to see more of...

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister Miltenberger.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister Miltenberger.

Agreed, thank you. I’ll ask the Sergeant-at-Arms to please escort the witnesses to the table.

For the record, Minister Miltenberger, please introduce your witnesses.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. I’d like to ask the Minister if he’d like to bring witnesses into the Chamber.

Alright. We will resume with that after a short break.

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I’d like to call Committee of the Whole to order. What is the wish of committee today? Ms. Bisaro.

Again, not so many years ago we did have a business in Alberta that is very informed with respect to the development of energy and hydro, and we could never seem to advance that discussion as far as we wanted to. We had an unsolicited proposal from ATCO, out of Alberta, to partner with us to expand the Taltson. They’ve got money; they’ve got experience. One of the concerns at the time was that we didn’t have the capacity on our side of the table to negotiate something that people thought would be fair for the Northwest Territories.

Do we have that capacity now and could we still be looking at...