Michael Miltenberger

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following two documents, entitled “Northwest Territories Heritage Fund Annual Report for 2012-2013” and “Northwest Territories Heritage Fund Annual Report for 2013-2014.”

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. For the record, I appreciate the Member’s comments. We had a fairly lengthy discussion about this yesterday. The comments I made yesterday I just leave stand on the record with regard to the Member’s concerns. Thank you.

This is a design/build contract road project. It’s the set price, $230 million. We need to make sure that we give the contractor all the tools, both fiscal and otherwise, that he needs to get the job done so he can move the design requirements and stay within budget.

This allows us to catch up to the road that wasn’t constructed last year because it was a slow start. This is not a gift or benefit to the contractor. That’s the only reason we are doing it. It’s not because he just decided it would be better off for him just because.

We are all very, very conscious of our obligation and the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Member’s question is consistent. What he’s asking is consistent with the concerns being raised by Mr. Bromley about extreme fire events, not just fire events but extreme weather events, changing rain patterns. If you look, it’s hard not to see it wherever you look in the news. If it’s here, if it’s California, if it’s down in Brazil, it’s down in Africa, all over the world, if it’s not flooding there’s enormous long-term drought and unpredictability. To the issue of…(inaudible)…where they used to be able to predict whether within a fairly set range is gone for the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I agree with the Member’s assessment and we have been talking about this for quite some time now, about the impacts of climate change and global warming and extreme weather events. We have been dealing with the costs to us, as a government, now for quite some time. I think back to things like having to replace all the wooden piles as the temperatures warmed and they thawed out and turned to, basically, mush. Either change the piles or replace the buildings, not to mention all the other impacts. So, I agree and we are going to be working collectively here to deal with...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just note that there’s a clause in the current contract that does also allow for a three-year extension of the current contract.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the Member’s assessment, her bottom line assessment that at the end of the day it was a good decision to put the $20 million to offset the rates. The intent was not to make Members look bad. The intent was to deal with a pressing issue that was going to put all of our constituents under needless or extra financial burden at a time when we’re all struggling with how do we deal with the cost of living. We do place great value on protocols. We spend an enormous amount of time when we do business on process, making sure we’ve touched every base that needs to...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Once the start-up is over, the anticipation is that it would become a part of the regular budgeting process and not necessarily through the supplementary appropriation process.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In regards to the first issue raised by the Member, we provide weekly updates to MLAs during fire season and we will add a financial component to that to allow Members to track, as do we, the costs and expenditures during fire season.

In regard to the second issue, I want to, of course, concur with the Member that Northerners have reacted very favourably to the $20 million that was used to offset the proposed rate increase, and the reason that we did $20 million - $15 for the rest of this fiscal year, $5 million to carry us over to June – is because we had to give the...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Member is correct in this case. Building season and the school year got way ahead of the legislative and budgetary process that we run and we are currently in. So the Member is correct. There were commitments made. There was a need to be ready and so the work was, certainly in these instances, done, contrary to what the law of general application for supplementary appropriations and getting approval before you spend the money, in order to meet the program needs, as the Member alluded to. Thank you.