Mr. Speaker, reliable energy services such as electricity and heating fuel are essential.

The Premier and my Cabinet colleagues have outlined many of the measures that NWT residents, businesses and governments can and will take to counter the rising costs of these energy services in the short term.

However, conservation is just one element of the GNWT's responsibility for energy management. We must also address the underlying cause of increased energy costs.

In the long term, we will continue to require access to affordable and reliable energy sources to meet our daily needs and those of our growing economy.

Today almost all of our territory's annual energy supply is imported, in the form of fossil fuels, from southern Canada. We can neither control nor regulate the cost of this energy, and as we have seen, it is subject to sudden and large increases in response to world events, tragedy and the supply and demand nature of the global economy.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.