Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Item 7, written questions. Item 8, returns to written questions. Item 9, replies to Opening Address. Item 10, petitions. Item 11, reports of standing and special committees. Item 12, reports of committees on the review of bills. Item 13, tabling of documents. The honourable Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Antoine.

Item 13, tabling of documents. The honourable Member for Inuvik Twin Lakes, Mr. Allen.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following document entitled 14th Annual Report of the Victims' Assistance Committee of the Northwest Territories from April 1, 2002 to March 31, 2003. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you. Item 13, tabling of documents. The honourable Member for Weledeh, Mr. Handley.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following document entitled Workers' Compensation Board of the NWT and Nunavut, 2002 Annual Report. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Item 13, tabling of documents. The honourable Member for Thebacha, Mr. Miltenberger.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following document entitled NWT Health and Social Services System Action Plan; A Status Report April to September 2003. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Item 13, tabling of documents. The honourable Member for Nunakput, Mr. Steen.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following document entitled the Northwest Territories Sports, Recreation and Physical Activity System. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Item 13, tabling of documents. Item 14, notices of motion. Item 15, notices of motion for first reading of bills. Item 16, motions. Motion 16-14(6). Motion 16-14(6) will remain on the Order Paper until tomorrow. Item 16, motions. Motion 17-14(6). The honourable Member for North Slave, Mr. Lafferty.

Thank you, Mr. Lafferty. There is a motion on the floor. The motion is in order. To the motion.

Mr. Lafferty, you have the opening comments on it. Mr. Lafferty.

Thank you, Mr. Lafferty. To the motion. The honourable Member for Inuvik Boot Lake, Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I must say that the Member for North Slave definitely continues to work for his constituents in pushing this forward. Mr. Speaker, it was quite a controversy when the issue of a one-rate zone came through and now we see it being brought forward again by a motion.

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately at this time, I am going to have to speak not in support of this motion. I think that, number one, what we need to do as an Assembly, as Members of a government or the next government, we should be directing to have that discussion amongst Members, not send the staff out to do something just to be quashed again by somebody else when the political pressure is put on. Instead, as a government we need to decide if we are going to change the structure, then at that point, we can send the people out to do the work that we have decided politically.

When we decide or do it the way it was done before, there is always room for politics to kick in and to turn things around but, Mr. Speaker, in this motion, when we look at it, I have the same concerns that the rate zone in Inuvik is higher than it is in Yellowknife. But, Mr. Speaker, one thing we have as a government that we have continued to support is the subsidy program that has every resident of the Northwest Territories subsidized at the Yellowknife rate of the first 700 kilowatt hours.

Mr. Speaker, as a family man who has a large family, for the majority of months during the year, through the diligence of my wife, I manage to keep our household power rates down to take advantage of that. There are a couple of months a year that we go over slightly. Usually at Christmastime, Mr. Speaker, is one of the times. Mr. Speaker, I think instead of sending out the staff and the Power Corporation or directing the Public Utilities Board to do some more work on behalf of a rate structure, I think as leaders of the government and knowing that we are in the twilight hours of this Assembly, that instead we should be directing the next government to have that political discussion to decide if in fact that is the best way to go for our Power Corporation. I say ours, Mr. Speaker, because it does belong to all of the Northwest Territories and we have to decide if one flat-rate zone or two zones are the better way to go, but I think this is not an appropriate tool to be doing that at this late juncture. So, I will not be supporting the motion. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. To the motion. The honourable Member for Frame Lake, Mr. Dent.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I too will be opposing this motion and I would agree with my colleague, Mr. Roland, that the Member has certainly led the charge on this issue quite fashionably for a long time, but I don't think that this is a decision that should be thrown to the Public Utilities Board or the Power Corporation. They came forward and they filed an application once already, I got told by politicians that they couldn't go forward, so until the politicians have a clear position, there is no point in trying to move this forward at the bureaucratic level. That means that we do have to have some kind of political discussion on this issue if we are ever going to consider it. But I think what really makes this a difficult issue even for politicians to have a significant discussion around, is that it is a matter of social policy right now, that this government says that electrical power is so important to people living in the North that we have to subsidize the cost of the first 700 kilowatt hours to the same rate as what everyone is paying in Yellowknife. That represents a significant amount of money that this government puts into a social policy. Unfortunately, neither the Power Corporation nor the Public Utilities Board can ever guarantee that that is always going to be there. That is something that a future Legislative Assembly is always going to have to vote on and determine whether or not the subsidy is there.

I am concerned that if we were to go to a one-rate zone, I think it takes away part of the argument for the subsidy. I think that in the future what you are liable to see is if we are all paying $0.21 a kilowatt hour or $0.23 a kilowatt hour, if the financial situation of the government worsens, then we might be hearing the Minister of Finance say well we can't afford this subsidy any longer and so the price of electricity is going to have to go up. Then if the smaller communities are crying about how expensive it is, then it is too easy to say well you are paying the same rate as everyone else in the Territories, so what's the difference?

As far as I am concerned, one of the strongest arguments for the social policy we have now is the difference in the rates of power between some communities. As long as you have that difference, then it has to be looked at or the government has to look at subsidizing the rates in order to make it affordable to live in some of its smaller communities, and I think that is the best way we can protect the subsidy in the long run. I oppose the motion for two reasons: The process is wrong, there has to be the political will for Members in this House before we provide direction for the Power Corporation or the Public Utilities Board to consider such an approach; and, I think even after that discussion, I will still oppose it because I think that if we are all paying the same rates for power, we quickly lose the argument for the government subsidy and I think everybody in the Northwest Territories will wind up paying an unaffordable rate for power. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Dent. To the motion. The honourable Member for Great Slave, Mr. Braden.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, I too will be opposing the motion, although it certainly doesn't take too much understanding to appreciate why our colleague Mr. Lafferty is bringing this forward. The rates, the cost of diesel fuel and the cost of ensuring safe and reliable power supply is getting more expensive, but in the meantime we are doing battle with the whole cost of living issue and this is one of the consequences. Mr. Lafferty talked about the good fortune that we had in the previous decades because of large mining developments, some hydro stations were built and we had some infrastructure put in here. It wasn't quite as simple as Mr. Lafferty suggests, that those are just handed over to us. I won't go into that level of detail but the point of one part of a territory being able to transfer wealth or in effect subsidize other parts of the territory may have had some validity.

We had these huge corporate and industrial customers that were probably able to shave some of their bottom line off, but we don't have many of those customers here anymore, Mr. Speaker. In Yellowknife, their sun is setting; Pine Point, of course, is long gone, so the customer base is changing dramatically and some of our thinking that might go along with well, who can afford to pay, also has to change.

I'd also bring up the issue, Mr. Speaker, of the whole governing structure that we have in place to look after the delivery of this vital utility. We have not only a Power Corporation and a board of directors, which has a mandate on how to deliver electricity; we also have a Public Utilities Board, which has a mandate to set the terms of conditions and the price. That is something that this Assembly, I think back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, very deliberately and carefully decided to do, to take that regulatory responsibility out of the hands of political jurisdiction and give it to an independent group made up of experts who in effect are a proxy or a replacement for competition and do their job extremely or thoroughly. If we take this attitude in the Assembly that because, even for as good a reason as Mr. Lafferty raises, the cost is getting atrocious and absolutely unaffordable for some customers in some communities, we just can't go about deciding to ignore the rules and the fundaments of making these decisions. We can't ignore the Public Utilities Board. We should not be going around and shutting down boards of corporations because they haven't met our political priorities or mandates, Mr. Speaker. We need to be much more careful about how we take on the duties of governance and then how we apply it.

I am more on side with Mr. Dent's approach to this, which is, if indeed we do politically agree that we have to do something to change the way power is costed across our territory, then that is something that we need to determine on a political basis because we are going to have to dig very deep in our political wallet and our financial wallet to be able to afford that kind of thing. It may be the right thing for us to do. That is a very large debate that, as Mr. Dent has suggested, we need to have. In fact, I think we were about to have it last year, Mr. Speaker, when Cabinet did make that fundamental governance mistake when it went in and issued directives against the initiatives and I think that the prerogative of the mandate of not only our Power Corporation board but our Public Utilities Board. So we've got a political discussion to have in this Assembly and indeed with the customer base before we can go about just telling our institutions what to do.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, I would leave a thought about price as something that should be factored into the way we manage the cost of any utility, whether it is electricity or water or telephone service. The point that I am trying to make here, Mr. Speaker, is one of conservation. I think all you need to do perhaps is look at what is going on in Ontario where, the way I understand it, the government there has decided to freeze electricity rates at an artificially low level for political expediency and they are finding now that demand for this cheap electricity has rapidly overtaken their ability to generate and buy other supplies of electricity. So what have you done? Cheap electricity is not necessarily a great thing.

The price signal is a very good conservation tool and we should not be ignoring it, Mr. Speaker, anywhere in our territory, regardless of how little or how much it costs. Responsible energy use is something that we should all be paying attention to and the way we deliver the service and how much we pay, we ask for it is really part of the overall equation.

In summary, Mr. Speaker, I have every sympathy for why Mr. Lafferty wants this issue addressed, but we have yet to work on how to do it effectively and responsibly. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Braden. To the motion. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko.