Michael Miltenberger

What I can indicate is that we have been pursuing and made repeated requests to in fact have all the necessary travel claims submitted so that we can in fact close the file on the various trips. We have been using the power of persuasion. We don’t have a lot of direct authority over MLAs. They have travelled with us and we’re trying to make sure that we close the books, and we’re going to continue to pursue that and hopefully conclude it.

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Great Slave Lake, that Bill 72, Supplementary Appropriation Act (Operations Expenditures), No. 2, 2015-2016, be read for the second time.

This bill makes necessary supplementary appropriations for operations expenditures for the Government of the Northwest Territories for the 2015-2016 fiscal year.

We do have a policy. We quite rigorously police ourselves. As was raised in the House earlier, the issue with Minister Ramsay has been dealt with and the file is closed for a very, very small discrepancy. Things have been tightened up. Yes, we believe that we should have an even hand when we apply overdue travel claims since there are cases where MLAs accompany Ministers on foreign travel. There are some outstanding claims and we are encouraging those outstanding claims to be completed.

Thank you. This is a long-standing issue as well. The health budget is the largest budget in the territorial government and it’s the fastest growing. We put in millions, tens of millions of dollars a year in dealing with a lot of the damages caused by alcohol and alcohol abuse. So from a political optics point of view, I know the discussion has been there that we should take the money from liquor proceedings, fines and those types of things, to put them towards a special fund. That discussion is going to be ongoing, but at this point the money goes into consolidated general revenue and we...

Mr. Speaker, the Northwest Territories Power Corporation, or NTPC, continues to adapt and manage its resources to meet the needs of the ever-changing environment of power generation in the North.

For the second year in a row, NTPC is addressing low water on the Snare hydro system; however, extremely low water at Bluefish this year has added to the challenge. While NTPC is effectively managing the use of water and diesel to ensure a stable power supply to the North Slave, this government, with the support of the Legislative Assembly, contributed $20 million to ensure that additional diesel costs...

Thank you. The major concern was, of course, if a complaint was raised with a government service officer who would then file, then they would become party to an action that they may not in fact know that much about or may be caught up in an illegal proceedings that would make their job very, very difficult. So, are there ways to better be able to report? I think with new technologies, for example, coming down the valley if we have every community on fibre optic links and there’s better communications that people can phone. We had Safer Neighbourhoods legislation two Assemblies ago and there...

We have about $570 million that we hold in securities. That number has gone up from initially it was about $500 million. As we are getting into this business, there are constant reviews being done and if there are discrepancies then we work through the regulatory process to address those.

This is a shared responsibility under the water licences and environmental assessments. The majority of the money is handled by and flows through ENR through that process. We are looking at, as a government, how do we best structure ourselves to better provide oversight for all these outstanding securities across the land. We recognized very clearly after devolution that the federal government wasn’t paying anywhere near the attention they should have to this matter, and we’re currently at work internally still sorting out what’s the best way to structure ourselves to do that.

This is a journey of some duration we started back in 2005. We’ve made set targets and most of them were inward looking as a government, trying to put our own house in order. We are going to be putting out a new document, a renewal, but it’s not a Greenhouse Gas Strategy anymore. It’s going to be a Climate Change Strategy. That document is expected to be ready in the next couple weeks.

We are gearing up to be able to go to COP 21 in Paris, which I think, contrary to COP 12 or 15 that I attended in Copenhagen, which was supposed to be a seminal event, this one actually will be with the president...

With this big, pressing issue there are two things we need to do, of course. The mitigation that we’ve talked about in terms of reducing our greenhouse gases, our carbon footprint, switching to alternative energies, will have some immediate impact in terms of costs and effect of costs of living, but the longer term goal would be do our share, as global citizens, to reduce our carbon emissions and help mitigate the increasing temperatures. In the meantime, we also have to adapt, and as the Member has pointed out, we have had some structural failures. We’ve had pile replacements. This Highway No...