Thank you, Mr. Bell. Mr. Braden.

So then there was, yes, as the Minister said, several influences. It seems, from this explanation, that there are a couple of them that were outside of our strategic interest or outside our strategy. Maybe the Minister can tell me who it was, what part of the industry it was that said they were going to withdraw unless we gave up our diamond marks. Mr. Chairman, what was going on here? Was somebody kind of blackmailing us, or threatening us? Did the Minister have to do this? I guess what concerns me here is that we're allowing ourselves to be dictated to, Mr. Chairman, by other sectors of the industry, naturally, and given that some of them are here...I have a number of constituents who work for the cutting and polishing industry and I hold their concerns at the very top of my agenda. But some of these explanations here just seem to indicate that we're letting other people dictate our strategy or negotiate our strategy with us, rather than this government setting the terms that it thinks is good for them.

So this is the sense that I have of why we ended up kind of blowing up our diamond unit and giving up on some of these broader, longer-term, more visionary strategies, even though they may not have been giving us a quicker return or going in quite the right direction. Why were we so quick to walk away from some of this stuff, Mr. Chairman?

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Mr. Bell.

Mr. Chairman, I would certainly counter that we're not letting outside factors or outside influences determine and define our strategy and our needs. We're allowing our northern industry to be involved in defining and determining our strategy. I'm going to be very clear, industry, some of industry, in terms of their National Diamond Strategy participation, had backed away from the table. But that was not the reason for our participation or lack of participation in National Diamond Strategy. That was not the determining factor. Canadian Jewellers Association, Jewellers Vigilance Canada had indicated to us that they were no longer participating unless we gave up some trademarks. We weren't prepared to do that initially. The federal government was

quite clear with us that without those players at the table, this wouldn't be a relevant and compelling strategy and that they weren't going to participate in this without those players at the table. We had a decision to make at that point. We looked for a way forward. It was my impression that maybe we didn't need these official marks anyway and could still move ahead with this National Diamond Strategy. That was not at all the reaction that we got from the factories. The factories said never mind the National Diamond Strategy, keep those official marks, bolster our efforts, support our efforts. So it was really the northern industry and our factories that were the determining factor behind our desire to refocus and redouble our efforts locally on marketing and worry about national efforts at some point in the future. They're not going away. This is not a one-time-only opportunity. We think we can come back to that. But there are stages and steps here and we recognize that our first priority and our first focus had to be here at home. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Bell. Mr. Braden.

Mr. Chairman, one of the aspects of our involvement in the secondary diamond industry has been our success with training, with setting standards, and, in fact, as I understand, we should be justifiably proud because we played an international, we set some international bars in this area. So I wanted to ask the Minister if he would be able to advise, is our commitment to training in the secondary cutting and polishing industry at all changing, given that so much has happened in other areas of our support for this industry? Mr. Chairman, are we going to be keeping to our focus on education?

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Mr. Bell.

Mr. Chairman, we are committed to maintaining our focus and our efforts on training of cutting and polishing people who will work in that occupation. That's not to say that our efforts won't change and won't evolve. I recently met with one of the factories who talked to us about the effectiveness of the training and the readiness of people coming out of some of the programs and areas that we might be able to enhance that and work with them to focus on certain things. So I think this will continue to change and evolve, to better meet the needs of our industry. But I will restate my commitment that we're not going to do this in isolation from the local cutting and polishing factories. They're the ones who will be needing these employees. We have to understand and work on the basis of their needs to meet their needs.

A bit of statistical information: we've got approximately somewhere in the neighbourhood of 135 employees in the factories in the NWT. About 60 plus of those are northerners, and probably, I think, that's quite good. We can improve on that, but we've always known that there would be the requirement for imported labour for some time as we got this industry up and running. But I think this is moving ahead very successfully and will continue to improve. But we do have to understand industry's needs and we will continue to work with them. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bell. Page 11-19, activity summary, energy, mines and petroleum resources.

Operations expenditure summary, $8.743 million.

At this time I'd like to take a short break. Thank you.

Thank you. I would like to call Committee of the Whole back to order. Committee, we are on page 11-19, activity summary, energy, mines and petroleum resources, operations expenditure summary, $8.743 million.

Page 11-21, energy, mines and petroleum resources, grants and contributions, contributions, continued on 11-22, grants and contributions, total grants and contributions, $2.255 million.

Thank you, Mr. Braden.

Mr. Chairman, thank you. On page 11-22 there is a little bit of information about the department's involvement in the Taltson River hydroelectric program saying contributions to the NWT Energy Corporation to complete the feasibility studies on the environmental baseline work on the proposed Taltson River hydro expansion project at $1.045 million. Mr. Chairman, I am an unabashed fan of hydroelectric development for the Northwest Territories. The Taltson project has so many things going for it. This is one of the projects that I know is high on our government's list of potential projects and I certainly hope remains there.

The allocation we are looking at here, just over a million dollars, would be in addition to the $730,000 that this department put into the project last year. So we are starting to tally up a fair amount of investment here, Mr. Chairman. What I wanted to ask about now, if the Minister could give us a bit of a snapshot, is what have we achieved, what have we found out so far towards the viability of Taltson? What are the thresholds or key decision points that we still need to have in our hand before we really start making a major commitment on this, Mr. Chairman?

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Minister Bell.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think, as Members know, in '05-06, there was an approved contribution of $730,000 that went towards a feasibility study and also some environmental baseline work necessary, so there could be a filing of a permit application for construction of the Taltson hydro expansion project. This next year, we are proposing just over a million that will be continued work on feasibility study, environmental baseline work, getting us ready to file the permit applications. As the Premier is the lead on this file, I am going to refer to the Premier and have him comment

a little more on next steps and milestones as per your question, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Minister Bell. Mr. Handley.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The government has a team who are doing a number of things; one is doing the pre-engineering and pre-environmental work aimed toward having a project description package put together late this spring. If things look well, it could go forward from there for assessment. At the same time, we also have people who are negotiating with the diamond mining companies about the purchase of the power. Now that isn't firmed up yet, but I can tell you, given the price of fuel and the difficulty in transportation, there is serious interest from the diamond mining side.