Michael Miltenberger

The City of Yellowknife has indicated to us that they don’t need to borrow money from us, that they can get money at as cheap a rate as we can. They acknowledge that fundamentally this is a responsibility that falls within the purview of the City of Yellowknife. Should we get an increase to our borrowing limit, as the Premier has indicated, we have to maintain our fiscal discipline for the next couple years to get ourselves clear so that by year three and four we can invest money in key strategic infrastructure initiatives. If the City of Yellowknife at some point takes some further steps in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have a fairly good idea of what we can do and what we should do and I’ve laid that out to the Member, we’ve laid it out to Mayor Van Tighem and the City of Yellowknife.

Fundamentally, this is a municipal issue. The condo corporation has to get itself organized. It’s a private corporation. I know there are issues there. The mayor has indicated that they can borrow money as cheaply as us, and as I’ve indicated, as well, from the start, if there are things we’ve overlooked or totally missed, of course we will be prepared to consider those. But this file has been live for...

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Yellowknife South, that Bill 1, Appropriation Act (Infrastructure Expenditures), 2012-2013, be read for the second time.

Mr. Speaker, this bill authorizes the Government of the Northwest Territories to make infrastructure expenditures for the 2012-2013 fiscal year. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I seek consent to proceed with First Reading of Bill 1, Appropriation Act (Infrastructure Expenditures), 2012-2013. Thank you.

I acknowledge, as well, that the Member has been an impassioned advocate on behalf of the Pattersons over the years and to no small way that’s part of the reason that we’re still having these discussions. I appreciate that interest, and I’ve heard her concerns, and I will be following up and I will commit to keep her and her constituents informed. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have been working closely with the Patterson’s operation for the last number of years. We had meetings again yesterday trying to come to some agreement to allow this process to proceed and the operation that the Member talked to about to remain in business. There is still some work to be done, but clearly there are challenges in terms of the revenue that they can generate, the costs that they are incurring and the simple things like stumpage fees and such that they have difficulty generating enough revenue to cover. But we are still at work trying to see if something...

That is one of our interests and one of the reasons that we, when we looked at the fibre optic line, rather than going laterally north or west, sorry, to the Yukon, we looked at the plan to run the fibre optic line down the valley to hook in down by Fort Simpson so that we would be able to in fact provide those services and infrastructure improvements to the communities up and down the valley.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are two things of interest to the Member, of course: the fibre optic line that’s being proposed to go up the valley hooking Inuvik in as a remote sensing site and then coming down the valley, which would allow us to lateral off and hook into all the communities to provide fibre optic services which would include cell phone services. That is a project that is underway.

The other thing of interest in the CRTC ruling is not only that they opened the door to competition but they took NorthwesTel to task for lack of investment in their aging infrastructure, they refused...

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Yellowknife South, that Bill 1, Appropriation Act (Infrastructure Expenditures), 2012-2013, be read for the third time. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Yellowknife South, that Bill 1, Appropriation Act (Infrastructure Expenditures), 2012-2013, be read for the first time. Thank you.