Michael Miltenberger

As we move towards devolution and as we move towards the Government of the Northwest Territories setting up its northern-based regulatory regime, we will very certainly be meeting with industry, with the regulators, with the land and water boards, with the folks in the regions, in the Sahtu and other regions, and offshore as well, and absolutely, the issue of this type of damning report will be looked at carefully. We’re going to want to make sure that we’ll be able to provide comfort and certainty to Northerners that due process and due diligence and rigor has been applied to this issue, and...

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Tu Nedhe, that Bill 29, Supplementary Appropriation (Operations Expenditures), No. 3, 2013-2014, be read for the first time.

There are licences at play, there are remediation costs, and there’s a review to make sure that this issue is cleared up, the culpability is determined, and that the proper steps are taken to clean it up and make sure that we try to avoid those things in the future.

I seek unanimous consent to return to item 16, notices of motion for first reading of bills.

---Unanimous consent denied

Thank you, Madam Chair. Over the last few weeks, Members of the Legislative Assembly have been working hard on reviewing the departmental capital budgets for the 2014-15 fiscal year.

As part of their review, Members of this House have recommended amendments and other commitments to the Department of Transportation’s 2014-15 Capital Estimates.

I have considered these recommendations with my Cabinet colleagues and offer the following commitments:

Recommendation for chipsealing Highway No. 1

Highway No. 1 from kilometre 187 to 206 is currently a priority to be resurfaced in 2014-15. The department...

Thank you, Madam Chair. As we sit in this House, we are legislators who pass bills and make laws of general application and the Liquor Act is one of those bills. The other thing we do in this Legislature, as one of our guiding principles, is we’ve worked hard over the years to make sure that communities, at their request, have the maximum amount of authority as possible. This particular Liquor Act, which was put in place in 2008 after years of work, reflects where the main concern at the time, which we heard and responded to, was the request for the communities to have the ability to control...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve just had some discussion in this House about cost of energy, the fact that it’s driving Northerners away and it is crippling business. So one of the reasons we are very careful and we haven’t touched taxes for a number of years and we have looked at efficiencies is because we don’t want to add to the burden of business or to Northerners. We are spending millions on improving our energy efficiency and we are spending millions on looking at transmission line expansions, all tied to affecting the cost of living productively and to lower it. The issue of raising taxes...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will choose my response carefully. In this House where there is sometimes political theatre, the demand for instant, quick fixes, silver bullets may play well on the airwaves, but the Member knows in his heart of hearts – he’s been in this Assembly for a considerable amount of time – that everything takes planning. It takes planning, it takes design, it takes resources, it takes consultation and we’ve been working on these improvements since the last Assembly and we are going to continue to do that. If the Member has a silver bullet that he wants to share with us that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A point of clarification, for a commercial customer using 2,000 kilowatts in a five-kilowatt demand in Iqaluit and Yellowknife, in Yellowknife the total bill would be $476.53 and in Iqaluit it would be $953.73. Yellowknife to Iqaluit is lower by $477.20. At the residential level, there is a significant subsidy provided to residential power users in Iqaluit versus Yellowknife. Our rates are higher than Whitehorse, but clearly when you look at Whitehorse, they have the majority of their population living very, very close to the city. They have road access to all their...

Thank you, Ms. Chair. We will be supporting the motion. There are two areas that are affected by this. Should an individual have training in another area that’s recognized, then they would be exempted, plus there’s an Aboriginal right to hunt and to harvest. You can’t put any conditions on that. It’s clear. People will agree to it. We will work out how we… Everybody wants to have safe hunting practices within law. You cannot constrain that right that is guaranteed in the Constitution. Thank you.