Tom Beaulieu

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. The biggest contributor to the increase of heating fuel has been the wholesale cost of fuel. The wholesale cost of fuel over a 12-month period from early 2013 to early 2014 was 20 cents a litre. That is the price increase of the wholesale price when we purchased it Edmonton, and somehow that contributed to, for example, an increase of 17 cents a litre in Yellowknife.

The money that is put in here is a carry-over from an agreed contracted amount between the Department of Public Works and the contractor that did the work. As far as the government is concerned, we have a contract in place. There is a commitment on the part of the company to complete that road 100 percent according to the contract that they have in place, and our intention to do that.

All the highways in the NWT that are public highways are safe, as is this bypass road.

It’s a fairly standard process when the highway is ready for chipseal often it is open to traffic. The concept is that actually the driving on the road before the application of the chipseal doesn’t damage the road where it would need a lot of remediation before the application of the chipseal. As the road stands today, we would be able to prepare it and apply the chipseal and that opening it did not cause damage that exists now today had we not opened it at all.

Preparing the road is just to ensure that the road is ready for the application of chipseal.

With new buildings, it is anticipated that the energy costs would be much lower than other buildings built previously. There is no actual savings because we don’t have a comparative data, but when we upgrade older buildings into this type of energy-efficient envelope, increasing insulation values, we then take that and use those for all of the savings of the fuel that we burn or that we don’t burn, I suppose, on these buildings and then redistribute it into all of our energy programs.

For the new buildings, like I said, we would see a lot less cost than it would be having not constructed the...

Yes, we try to use the latest energy-efficient methods when we do new construction, as well, at this time. Thank you.

I’m not familiar with the policy that Nunavut employs. The policy that we use is to provide fuel, heating fuel and gasoline to communities where there are no individuals that consider it marketable to be able to sell fuel, so the government steps in as a last resource to provide that service to the individuals. The government tries to come in at the exact cost of fuel and we sell it for the cost of operating and purchasing and transporting the fuel to the community.

I was just making a comparison to the increase in YK. The Member is right; the increase in Tsiigehtchic, although we purchased the price of wholesale fuel for 20 cents a litre more, we charged 19 cents a litre more in Tsiigehtchic, so we did that by trying to use our Stabilization Fund to hold the price for a few months until the winter season was over so that the individuals in the smaller communities weren’t hit with the high fuel prices that we purchased in January. We held the price using our Stabilization Fund until the end of the winter season so that we would try to somehow keep the...

There has been no request at this time from the contractor that’s building the road for additional money in order to complete the project. To date, the money we have here is all the money that we intend on putting into that project to complete the project 100 percent.