Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, in his opening comments last night, the Minister mentioned that one of the goals this year was to bring into place a beverage container recovery program, which would be revenue neutral. I know the Minister spoke early on in his mandate of Minister of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development about how important he saw this. I know I have a number of constituents that have come to me in the past few years asking why we cannot have this kind of program in the North. The Minister did talk about wanting to do this last year. I was wondering if we could find out what has been the stumbling block. Why have we not been able to get this up and running sooner and are we certain we can get it going in this fiscal year that we are talking about now? Thank you.

Mr. Minister.

Mr. Chairman, I think the main stumbling block has been workload for our people in this section. We should have the draft report by the end of March and I would be happy to share it as soon as we have it. Thank you.

Mr. Dent.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do not know how much detail we can get before the draft report is done, but will this program cover all regions of the Northwest Territories or is it going to, because of cost, going to be limited to the larger centres?

Mr. Minister.

Mr. Chairman, no, our intention is to have it cover all communities in the Northwest Territories and hopefully have a program that is cost-neutral. Thank you.

Mr. Dent.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am happy to hear that and look forward to seeing the paper and hopefully helping to bring this into place in the next year. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Minister.

We will make it available as soon as we have it. Thank you.

I have to make sure it is on the record. Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just have a couple of issues I would like to address with the Minister. The first one is with regard to the energy strategy, the broad energy strategy that he references in his opening remarks. My recollection was there was no time line on the plan to do that. I fully support the need for an energy strategy. I would be interested to know what time line the Minister has attached to that very important process. Thank you.

Mr. Minister.

Mr. Chairman, we have a fairly small staff working in our environmental protection section, so they have a lot of tasks underway. We do view energy management as being important. Our schedule now for the final strategy to be brought to Cabinet is January 2002.

Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Will there be a chance for consultation and input from the people before the final product is stamped as complete? As the Minister knows, for example, I have some people who are quite knowledgeable in this particular area and I think they would add a lot to the debate and discussion to a really top-notch broad-range energy strategy. Thank you.

Mr. Minister.

Mr. Chairman, we want to do this with as broad a consultation as possible. The intention right now is to have a preliminary strategy put together by May for discussion purposes, conduct some consultation with stakeholders over the June/July/August period and then have it ready to go out to public consultation some time in October/November, somewhere in that period.

Mr. Miltenberger.

Mr. Minister.

Mr. Chairman, yes, I am interested in having a look at that kind of proposal. We need clarification on exactly what we are piloting. There is surplus interruptible power right now. As soon as the consultation period is over on the power generation study, then I think we as a Cabinet will take a look at the recommendations and how we will proceed with it. Certainly Fort Smith is connected by the power grid. There should be some interesting options to look at there. Thank you.

Environmental protection services, operations expense, total operations expense, $1,869,000. Agreed?