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.