Michael Miltenberger

Thank you. The discussion with the federal government, they made it clear to us that they were not going to cover off the Opportunities Fund under the borrowing limit. We had an arrangement prior to that, it was satisfactory and worked fine, that the Auditor General said was fine and the federal government, Finance Canada said in their opinion they disagreed and this would become part of our borrowing limit. We are not in a position to do that, so we made the decision, we were negotiating an increase to our borrowing limit. It wasn’t going to be bumped up enough to accommodate the...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Over the last few months Executive Council and Members of the Legislative Assembly have been working hard on a compressed 2012-13 planning schedule.

This included the review of departmental 2012-13 business plans in April and consideration of the 2012-13 Main Estimates in Committee of the Whole during the Third Session.

As part of their review, Members of this House have recommended amendments to the 2012-13 budget.

The Financial Management Board has considered these recommendations. Based on our discussions, we are prepared to make the following adjustments:

With...

I apologize if I seem like I’m being obtuse or a little slow here. We get the money and we pay 1.4 percent.

Thank you, Madam Chair. This is the Residential Power Subsidy Program.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d have to ask the Member to clarify the interest rate that we would lend to ourselves, that we’d lend to other people or other businesses?

I’ll get Mr. Kalgutkar to speak to that, but the amount does drop from $5 million on down. I’ll ask Mr. Kalgutkar to provide the detail.

Thank you, Madam Chair. When I indicated that it looks like things from an economic point of view are improving, one of the assumptions in that is, for example, if you look at the Sahtu, there’s a huge amount of activity. If that oil play in fact advances past the exploration stage, I believe we will see an increase in population. As the other diamond mine goes on stream, there’s potential there as well. We have six, seven, eight, as the Premier and the Minister of ITI have laid out, significant projects on the drawing board in the pipeline for development, all of which would not be able to be...

Thank you, Madam Chair. As I indicated in my comments to the departmental budget, we’re the banker and we basically flow the money through to the Housing Corporation to run their operations and do the work they do with housing.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I share the Member’s assessment that things are on the way up. In the Northwest Territories there is increased activity in a number of areas. We tried to capture that in the budget address. The revenues indicate, would corroborate, that there is that type of positive upswing. Thank you.

The number that was used is there was $7 million residual in that fund that we kept in accrued interest and such and we’re putting into the planning process is slated towards economic issues. This is talking about history that can be changed. The harsh reality for me was we hadn’t lent this money out. We were lending it to ourselves. We had $125 million in the bank that, according to how the federal government did their accounting, was considered a debt. So for most people if you think you have $125 million cash, they had given it to us through their Immigrant Investor Fund. It was cash in the...