Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To be clear, I am not looking for a $1.4 million pay cheque sitting somewhere, or a bundle of cash some place. It is just the process. Again, my understanding is if you have appropriated a certain figure for an activity, for that to be corrected throughout the year, if it was taken out and transferred to someplace else, it would come in through supplementary appropriation. Obviously this is not the case, because in the books printed now, it still states $4.1 million. In fact, they only had $2.7 million, so almost $1.4 million was transferred to other places. Can the Minister provide that information? What transfer occurred? Where did it go? Thank you.

Mr. Minister.

Mr. Chairman, I will just ask Mr. McLeod to try explaining what has happened after this. Thank you.

Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Next on the list I have Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to pursue a question on tourism again with the Minister. I want to follow up on what he stated to the Member for Thebacha. He stated very strongly that he wanted to work on building regional capacities for the tourism industry. He also stated this in his opening comment awhile back.

Given that most of the hotels and motels are in the city of Yellowknife and, over the weekend, Mr. Chairman, I did not have anything better to do, so I actually went into the yellow pages and counted all the hotels and bed and breakfasts. I found about 46. So for all the Yellowknife ones, I am wondering if the Minister is saying he is going to collect the taxes out of Yellowknife businesses so he can give it to the regions? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Minister.

Mr. Chairman, there are roughly between 1,100 and 1,200 hotel and bed and breakfasts rooms across the Territories. So about one third are in Yellowknife. As I said before, I want to go through a process of consultation with the industry and all these stakeholders before I make decisions on allocation, either the vehicle for it or what the actual break out will be. It will go into two main areas. One is building regional capacity. The other one is in enhancing our marketing.

I do not think that Yellowknife businesses need to worry. As a centre, most of the flights, practically all the flights land here. We will do very well by enhanced tourism all across the Territories, because people will come here. They will spend time here and then they will move on to the regions.

I do not think that we need to worry too much about the distribution between Yellowknife and the other communities yet. I think that it will be a fair distribution and I think everybody will benefit. I want to work in consultation with the industry and other stakeholders before firming up how the money is going to be divided up. Thank you.

Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Minister had indicated earlier in question period that he has been consulting. I can tell the Minister that I have also been consulting. I have had a couple of lunches and other phone calls and I have been talking to the hoteliers over the weekend. One of the major hotel operators in town told me that he is really suffering.

There is a high occupancy rate during the winter, but not in the summertime. He is having a hard time charging the rooms at the rate that he usually has, and five percent extra on it will be a very negative factor.

I also talked to a motel operator who told me that four years ago, he was able to fill his rooms with exploration, but not anymore. I have talked to a bed and breakfast operator who told me that if this tax was instituted, she will have no choice but to shut it down because she said that this would be nothing but a harassment to small business.

From talking to these operators, the only light in this whole thing is that they might buy into it if they could see a tourism strategy that they could relate to. A strategy that had a common vision and an implementation plan about where we are going with this tourism strategy. The thing is, Mr. Chairman, we do not have a strategy. I know that the department has a draft copy that is floating around. However, I believe the Minister did not think that was good enough, because he was addressing too many priorities.

My question is, we just had a tabling of the Economic Panel Strategy, which took no less then three years. The Transportation Strategy took as long, as did any strategy of that magnitude or that is worth anything. That strategy has to have a buy-in, and in order to have a buy-in, there has to be participation by the stakeholders.

Could the Minister explain how he is going to be able to come up with a tourism strategy that would have a clear vision of where it is that the Northwest Territories is going with respect to tourism? How is it that he is going to be able to do it in the next six months, with the understanding that most people take the summers off and we have a Christmas month and so on. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Minister.

Mr. Chairman I do not think that all strategies have to take three years to be successful or to be good strategies. I think that the Non-Renewable Resource Development Strategy is a good example. That one only took us a couple of months to pull together, consultations ongoing and I think that it is a good strategy with wide buy-in.

I look at the amount of work that has already gone into the tourism strategy and I do not see it as being a three-year exercise to do the consultation and pull together a good strategy well in advance of the next fiscal year, well in advance so that people know how the money that we generate from the hotel tax will be distributed. I do not think that it is an issue.

I have to say that some of the reasons and some of the concerns that hotel owners have expressed are exactly the reasons like poor occupancy during the period that we do not have Japanese tourists. That is exactly the reason why we need to generate more activity in this area. It is not a time to dig ourselves into a corner somewhere. The biggest operator of tourists in the Territories, the man who brings us 8,000 or 10,000 Japanese each year, is a strong supporter of this kind of initiative.

The Northwest Territories Tourism Association came to my office and they told me that they worked with a consultant who has done work across Canada and can show us that five percent makes absolutely no difference to business levels, in terms of tourists coming here. When it gets into the neighbourhood of 20 percent, it begins to make a difference.

There is a lot of work that has been done already. It is not as if we are starting fresh. So I do not have any doubt at all that we can produce the strategy in the time frame that I have set. Thank you.

Just a reminder that the whole concept of a hotel tax is not part of this main estimate. There is no reference to it in the main estimates and we are dealing with the area of resource management, economic development and tourism. The question is valid but if you could just phrase it around the area of tourism. Because there is no reference to the tax in this budget. Ms. Lee.

Mr. Chairman, speaking with respect to a tourism strategy in general, given that the Minister has chosen to refer to other supporters, I could tell the Minister that I actually golfed with the main operator who brings in 10,000 Japanese tourists and he told me very clearly that he would not support this tax unless there was a clear strategy.

Mr. Chairman, I could also say that the Minister already stated this morning that a lot of the Non-Renewable Resource Strategy was lifted from the Economic Panel Strategies. So that is three years of ground work that our government has borrowed and I think it is good to borrow good ideas, but I do not think that it is being totally forthright when he says that he was able to come up with the Non-Renewable Resource Development Strategy in two months.

Mr. Chairman I just want to state that this is something that has to be taken seriously. This place is in need of a really good strategy. It never fails to amaze me when I talk to tourism operators, how everyone has a different ideal about what we need. In order to bring all the voices together, we have to give it the time and resources necessary, and not ram it through by way of a tax measure. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Minister.

I did not hear a question. I have no comment.

Ms. Lee, do you want to put that in the form of a question?

My question is does he not agree that the reference to the Non-Renewable Resource Development Strategy is false? It will take a lot longer to come up with a really good strategy.

Mr. Minister.

No, it is not false. We produced a Non-Renewable Resource Strategy. It is a good strategy. It was done using available information. So will the Tourism Strategy.

We are on page 11-17, resource management, economic development, operations expense, total operations expense $32,212,000. Agreed?

We are on page 11-19, resource management, economic development, grants and contributions, grants, $678,000. Agreed?