Michael Miltenberger

Mr. Speaker, I rise in the House today to update the people of the Northwest Territories on one of our key initiatives to respond to the global climate change problem: the NWT Greenhouse Gas Strategy.

As Members will recall, the Greenhouse Gas Strategy is one of the driving forces aimed at reducing our energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions, particularly within our government’s operations. It is this strategy that drives related initiatives in the areas of alternative energy, energy efficiency and climate change adaptations. More importantly, Mr. Speaker, the Greenhouse Gas Strategy is...

First let me just make a quick comment, if I may, in response to the comments about the fiscal and financial health of the Government of the Northwest Territories.

We’re one of the best run jurisdictions in the country, top three. We have an Aa1 credit rating. We have one of the best debt-to-GDP ratios, revenue-to-interest ratios in the country. We are pushing ourselves fiscally because we have a lot of things to do as a territory and we’re not prepared to sit back and be overly cautious. We’re careful and prudent, but we know we have to do things. As a government, we are managing ourselves...

Thank you, Madam Chair. That’s the whole point of all the estimating we’ve been doing. This has to be a fair deal. We have to get value for money. This is not a cost-plus contract. Everybody that’s involved in this project knows how difficult it is to come by money of this magnitude and the need to provide the public clear evidence of value for money.

When we do our fiscal forecasting, we make, I think, very good, appropriate decisions to make sure the money that we have is allocated to cover what has been identified as priorities of this government and this Legislature. The Tuk-Inuvik highway is one of those priorities. We will say enough is enough when we are all up on the Inuvik-Tuk highway cutting a ribbon that says we are now open for business and we will have a major northernmost chunk of the northernmost piece of the Mackenzie Valley Highway complete.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I apologize if I have caused confusion. What it means is this is borrowed money. It would be $50 million less debt. We had booked $150 million. We had budgeted $150 million because we didn’t know what the federal government was going to put in other than the $150 million. The project cost was $300 million, so for planning purposes, until we knew what the federal number was, we budgeted $150 million of our money to go towards that project until we knew what the final federal dollar was going to be. Now that we know it’s $200 million, that means we have $50 million of...

The $200 million contribution by the federal government is their final contribution to this project. It will be up to us to manage the project successfully with our investment to hit the $299 million.

The big project, the final determination has yet to be made how we will proceed with that, whether it will be total public tender, negotiated. We have to look at a lot of factors. This $65 million, given the specificity of the work and the tight time frames, there’s a negotiated contract being worked out to put this money to use. But I’ll ask Mr. Neudorf to add a little more detail, please.

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

---Unanimous consent granted

Thank you, Madam Chair. Once again I apologize for double-siding my speech.

With respect to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources:

$100,000 to increase funding to the Energy Efficiency Incentive Program. This increase will be funded through the transfer of $100,000 from the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment.

$400,000 to implement a program to replace electric hot water heaters with fuel-fired hot water heaters in communities that depend on thermal generation for electricity.

---Applause

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following three documents, entitled Supplementary Estimates (Infrastructure Expenditures), No. 4, 2011-2012; Supplementary Estimates (Operations Expenditures), No. 4, 2011-2012; and Supplementary Estimates (Operations Expenditures), No. 3, 2012-2013.