Michael Miltenberger

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To err on the side of caution in making sure that we have the ability to continue to pay all our required debts and bills and make payroll and all those type of things, we’re going to put a bill on the table that’s going to request that we raise that $275 to $300 million for the short-term. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’ll touch on a number of items and then I’ll ask Mr. Neudorf to speak to some of the more technical issues.

As we talk about the borrowing limit, we have the soon-to-be resolved issue of the borrowing limit of the federal government to be dealt with. I can say with confidence that the borrowing limit’s going to go up. The issue that has not been determined is how much. That’s an issue that is coming to fruition here in the very near future.

This project was four years and the majority of the work was scheduled for three. We have a northern contractor that is now up and...

I apologize to the Member for not answering the question. As he was asking about short-term borrowing, my short-term memory left me there for a second and I need to get reminded by the deputy what the question was.

There was urgency to deal with the process. There was urgency to provide assurance and reassurance to the people of the Northwest Territories where there was a growing sense of urgency, demands that something had to be done and, in addition to trying to touch the bases we needed to touch, deal with the NTPC, deal with the PUB. We took all those factors into consideration and...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have at the witness table Mr. Russ Neudorf, deputy minister of Transportation; Michael Aumond, deputy minister of Finance; Olin Lovely, the director of Management Board Secretariat.

This was in the tail end of summer and in the heat of the fire season. The Power Corporation had followed their process and notified the PUB, and we are aware of that as well. Then the issue came to be what was the impact gathering Cabinet to have those discussions and what would be the response and the need to review what was we thought the most feasible way to proceed, and what did we need to provide to the PUB to give them the assurance that whatever decision that was made would make NTPC whole in terms of the money they were requiring and that we were going to get through that rate rider.

Yes, I do, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In regards to the second part of the motion, we of course are going to be looking at the fire crews. We had very good fortune and a good response when we started training emergency firefighters, and the issue of are we adequately staffed on the ground is one we’re going to look at as part of our comprehensive annual review that we do. So we are going to work on that.

In relation with community firefighters, fighting residential fires is one that we haven’t explored that much, but we definitely are going to be looking at are we staffed up to the right degree with the...

Yes, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

We, as a government, have mapped out our next steps, now that we know the transmission project is prohibitively expensive to look at generation in all the communities. That is the plan where we believe there is the ability to seriously affect the cost of living.

The Member would know, as a Member of this Legislative Assembly, while from Inuvik, to look at all the needs of people in the Northwest Territories, that it would not be possible just to look at Inuvik as a stand-alone community for some special subsidy when you listen to the cost of living in McPherson and Tsiigehtchic and Sachs and...

As I indicated, we are looking at trying to minimize the reliance on diesel. We’re looking at a whole host of ways to do that. So no, there is no subsidy for heating fuel being considered. If we did it we’d have to do it for every thermal community, we’d have to do it across the Northwest Territories. It would be tremendously expensive and at the end of the day I don’t think it would do much over the long term to minimize reliance and encourage people to look at other alternatives other than diesel. Thank you.