Thank you. Maintenance is the O and M of the infrastructure in most of the communities. For example, the one in Rae, when DPW pulled out of the O and M and were only there for advice, they found there was a great amount of savings because of the administration cost. They were not being billed from Public Works and Services. They were paying 15 percent for administration fees above the contractors doing the job.

If somebody comes out, they have three government cars show up. Three people come out and they stand around a hole. There is a broken pipe. When they go back to Yellowknife, they charge for three vehicles and three people from administration. Is that still happening in some of the smaller communities, where somebody comes and checks something and calls somebody else to do the work? Is that still happening? I would just like to know.

Mr. Chairman, typically if there is a problem in a community, we will send out whoever is in the best position to be able to deal with that. If we do not know what the problem is, then we will send out one of the facility managers who will assess the situation and then assign the work order to the appropriate trade person. If it is a more involved or more complex problem, they will bring in resources from headquarters, either engineering or technologist resources, to assess the problem and try to come up with a solution.

I understand that is currently happening in Rae right now, where they have recently run into some problems operating the water plant. We had to send down some technical support people to demonstrate what the problem was and what the solution was.

Agreed.

Mr. Chairman, the largest portion of the work and the dollar expenditure are related to energy efficiency initiatives. The Department of Public Works and Services is taking a lead in a couple of those initiatives, specifically trying to re-establish a data base of utilities consumption and cost information from which the department and the government can begin to do some more long-range planning on managing its energy consumption.

The work to date has involved identifying a suitable electronic data base that can be used to capture this information and attempting to identify all the various sources of information, so that we can determine how best to access it. Then we will be moving over the next fiscal year to actually trying to load that data into the new information system and begin to track on an annual basis what the consumption and cost of energy and utilities is for all departments and all government agencies.

That is the chunk that the Department of Public Works and Services is predominantly involved in and it is working with a number of other departments in that regard.

There are a number of other initiatives that other departments are taking the lead on, and I am afraid I cannot give you an update on those other than there is a interdepartmental utilities management committee that has been established under the chair of the Department of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development.

That interdepartmental committee will be attempting to coordinate the various initiatives as well as to act as something of a peer group for the review of initiatives that are undertaken by individual departments and ensure that all departments are taking this initiative seriously.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The discussions about an energy strategy are not sufficiently far along that I can speak from that perspective. It would certainly be my expectation that the energy efficiency initiatives portion of the task team's work and also the subsidies portion would both figure prominently in the energy strategy. I can indicate that the energy subsidies activity also showed up within the Greenhouse Gas Strategy that has been tabled. There are very strong links between all of these activities.

Thank you, Mr. Braden. We have dealt with general comments. We are in directorate, operations expense, total operations expense, $6,834,000. Agreed?

Agreed.

Page 5-11, asset management. Mr. Dent.

Thank you, Mr. Dent. Minister Steen.