Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Villeneuve.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just one more quick point on the commercial fishery in the NWT. It says here we will provide more than $390,000 in industry support payments. I'm just wondering how much more of $390,000 the Minister is referring to.

Thank you, Mr. Villeneuve. Mr. Minister.

Thank you. I believe we're contributing $395,000 in 2004-05 to this program. I think there are three or four schedules laid out. One is to help Great Slave Lake fishermen with transportation costs. It's obviously a long way to market. Another is to help them improve capital and make reinvestment in their fleet, in their equipment, to make sure that it's as modern as possible. We acknowledge that it's not a lot of money. We certainly would like to do more. The Great Slave Lake fishermen are not currently catching the quota. I know costs have been done for some time, that is a concern for us. We have had discussion with Great Slave Lake fishermen around a need to really take a future look at the fishery and try to look out and see if we can't determine in five, 10, 15 years what the future of this fishery will be, because there are a number of options on the table for investment including petitioning the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation to improve the plant and facilities in the Hay River area so it can be more efficient. We can cut down on costs and improve the margins in this industry. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Villeneuve.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Maybe just to follow up on that same question. I'm just wondering if any capital or infrastructure dollars or any kind of business support has been given to the freshwater fish marketing plant in Hay River in the last five years.

Thank you, Mr. Villeneuve. Mr. Minister.

I can certainly confirm this for the Member, but we're not aware of any financial aid that has been given to that facility. It is, I believe, owned by the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation. If anybody was going to make a capital investment in that facility it would be that corporation, but we have provided capital, as I said, under this existing program to fishermen to upgrade their fleet. But specific to the plant, no.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Villeneuve, your time has expired. I'm going to move now to general comments. Mr. Delorey.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm just going to make a few comments and a few questions on the Minister's opening remarks. I'll have more questions when we go through page by page. I wanted to start on page 2 with Arctic Energy Alliance. I bring up this Arctic Energy Alliance quite often, and I must be missing something or nobody has ever been able to explain to me or show me the concrete evidence of the value that we're getting for this outfit. I just see an enormous amount of duplication of what this Arctic Energy Alliance does with anything from hardware stores to Wal-Mart to the Power Corporation, you name it. I just have yet to see something concrete come from there, and maybe I'm missing something. Maybe just somebody hasn't explained it to me right. Now I'm even a little more concerned, because now we're talking about $560,000 and to leverage another $1.5 million in federal dollars, I'm not sure how this is worded in here. I would like to get clarification. The $1.5 million from the federal government over the coming years, is that $1.5 million per year over the next coming years, and is this money all administered by the Arctic Energy Alliance, Mr. Chairman?

Thank you, Mr. Delorey. Mr. Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, I believe that the $1.5 million in ongoing future years that we're hoping to lever from the federal government will both flow through the department and through the Arctic Energy Alliance, depending on the program. Obviously one of the reasons for having the Arctic Energy Alliance is it provides us a mechanism to flow federal money easily to consumers so that they can be involved in programs to help reduce their reliance on fossil fuels and other initiatives. I think the past funding level of $200,000 for this agency through RWED, there is the $300,000 for this other program that we talked about earlier, but it allows us to do things like energy audits and it has an educative mandate. The Power Corporation also funds this organization. We are partners with the Power Corporation

in this. But I think it is a very tangible way that we can lever our federal investment in this regard, and I think that there will be more and more federal investment in this area in future. Certainly we can have some discussion about the mandate of this agency. Where there is duplication, if there is duplication, I certainly think it makes sense to sit down and address that and talk about it. I know this is something that the Member has been raising for a number of years, and I'm certainly prepared to enter into that discussion. But I do believe we need a mechanism that allows us to take advantage of a lot of these federal programs.

I think in past we may have missed out on a lot of federal money, and I want to make sure that that doesn't happen, that wherever there are federal pots of money we can take advantage of it and I think we need a mechanism to do that. I think the Arctic Energy Alliance can allow us to do some of that. So as to mandate, we can certainly have that discussion though.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Delorey.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I guess that's one thing that I would be willing to sit down with somebody and really go over this. Is what is given in here at what the Arctic Energy Alliance addresses is consumption of energy, control of emission of greenhouse gasses and plans for changes and warmer climate? Every department does that now, and I just think that it's a duplication. I think if the Power Corporation was carrying out and identifying the same projects that the Arctic Energy Alliance is going into, that they would be able to leverage the federal money if it's the program delivery in certain areas. My concern with them is with the duplication. But I will leave it at that for now. I would be willing to sit down with the department and have them convince me that there's more to it than that. So I will leave that one at that for now.

I would like to go on to another area, and that's on page 3 where in cooperation with the Government of Alberta we are developing an integrated information management system to store and share wildlife population and habitat data. I would like to get more clarification on that. We have some information systems within our government right now that are just building and costing huge amounts of money. I would like to know a little bit more about where we're going with this. Is this another huge bureaucracy that's going to be developing and growing to store wildlife information? Could I get more explanation of this one? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Delorey. Mr. Minister.

Thank you. I've paid attention to the Member's concern, and it's a concern that we've had as a department. We recognize that we needed a cost-effective way to gather this information on wildlife population and habitat data. We need good baseline information, especially with the pace of development in the Northwest Territories. It's important that we're able to recognize where there are impacts and be able to mitigate those impacts. Without good baseline data, we aren't able to do that. So the rationale for the approach here was to avoid doing just what the Member has suggested, and that was to take on a very costly mechanism and set up a very costly system on our own. So the idea here really was to partner with the Alberta government and cost share this. The rationale then for this, in April 2003 we did enter into a memorandum of agreement with sustainable resource development of the Government of Alberta, so that we could get a copy of this wildlife management information system. It's under development, but we're working with the Government of Alberta to see this to fruition. We think this is a very cost-effective mechanism for us to move forward on. I think we don't have the money to do this on our own, and so that's why we partnered with the Government of Alberta.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Delorey.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a comment on that then. I know that in talking with different organizations, it seems to me that every land claim group and self-government group is in the process of doing that same thing: taking wildlife studies and establishing data. Again are we duplicating a system that's already in place, or is it all tied in with the same program?

Thank you, Mr. Delorey. Mr. Minister.

Certainly there are land claim organizations doing pieces of work in this area, but we have a responsibility as the overall public government to establish a system Northwest Territories-wide, and other organizations are able to feed into the system and contribute and make use of it. But we think that we need one system that will collect this information and collect this data. It can be used by our aboriginal government partners, but we have a mandate to do this work and it's certainly important that we do it. We simply can't assume or wait for others, even the federal government to step into this area where we have a mandate. It's our feeling that if we don't do it, it won't happen and we don't think that that is appropriate or acceptable, especially given the pace of development.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Delorey.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I guess I bring that area up too, is where again the possibility of a lot of duplication going on, of two outfits doing basically the same thing.

Anyway, I'd like to go to page 5 and make mention of the forest industry. Again it mentions here that a pilot project to develop a more cost-efficient and timely way to collect forest inventory information will be completed during 2004. Another area that we've been talking about for four years is forest inventory. You get everything from it's going to be done in five years, it's going to be done in 10 years, it should be done. When we first started talking about it four years ago, it was going to be done in two years, but we're still talking about it now, we're developing a pilot project. Where are we with forest inventory and where are we going with it? What are we getting for our money with doing this, for looking for value for dollars spent? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Delorey. Mr. Minister.