Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, just comments to the Minister on his opening statements. I'll make some general comments to his opening statements to the House here. Mr. Chairman, I would like to say to the Minister on this, several issues on this opening, on his presentation. The first one I want to talk about, the stabilization of Ehtseo Ayha School in Deline and that the school was worked on pretty quickly by staff members to get things ready within the time frame because of the closeness of opening up the school in
Deline and that I must commend the Minister and his staff for getting there real quick and causing a lot of relief for the families because of the school system and the way it's working. I'm not too sure on the timing of how the assessments are done on such a public institution that follows certain time frames of their opening of their buildings. However, Mr. Chairman, the department's responded fast and quite surprising to the people of Deline that they got in there, they did the work, and they caused a minor, minimum delay of opening the school system for that year. I just wanted to say it to the Minister because they did do good work there. So I must say that to him.
I guess my question would be to other facilities in my region and any other facilities in the North, are we, from that experience are we going to be feeling somewhat comfortable by the MLAs that some of these institutions such as the school would be looked at in terms of this type of program? So I was only going to comment that somewhere in the books I guess the Minister will maybe or he could hand me some information if he wants to, to show me a plan for the wood piling remediation program for such situations as this one here.
The other one I want to talk to the Minister is on the biomass heating system in the North Slave Correctional Facility. I think it's a leading-edge project going ahead and I would like to see something like that in, of course, our region in terms of some facilities that are run by the Department of Public Works and Services and maybe on a smaller scale. I'm not too sure. I certainly would like to take a look at that system more closely in the North Slave Correctional Facility and that I think there's great opportunities in the North for a system like that in other regions that would help with the cost of living and cost of doing business in smaller remote communities. So I just wanted to commend the Minister, I guess, on that one too, for that initiative and cost-saving measure. I'd like to take outside of the larger centres now to see how these type of programs like the North Slave Correctional Facility, how do you put that into smaller communities and work them into the smaller centres like ours in the Sahtu?
The other point I want to make is the infrared thermal scan of GNWT buildings and community buildings. That's a good one again, too. I'm not too sure where that's going now. Once you've done the buildings, you looked at it and said, okay. So it costs you this much to fix the building or whatever they have to do, where does the community go after that? Does the Public Works lead the communities into a direction where they can help themselves or help their buildings or help the private businesses such as the band or the Metis or the town office to fix up the buildings?
Good things in those areas are my comments to the Member, to the Minister. Sorry, Mr. Chairman; to the Minister.
Mr. Chairman, my last comment would be a general comment on the quality of community drinking water and the department's working closely with the three identified departments of Health and Social Services, Municipal and Community Affairs, and Environment and Natural Resources. Again, I bring this up on behalf of my community and that community is Fort Good Hope as I talked about the issue of dead water. I'm not too sure what type of issues are being looked at in terms of satisfying the community there to say they have good quality water, yet I have several elders from that community that keep reminding me that we should look at the dead water issue and see something to be done to satisfy them. Public Works is looking at that and I'm not too sure where they are with the other departments in terms of having that water issue resolved with the community of Fort Good Hope and look at types of solutions that could satisfy the elders in the community that would leave them with a level of comfort that the water is of good quality. Right now I'm going to just wait until the Minister gets to those pages in his budget to talk about that.
So I'll leave those comments to the Minister, Mr. Chairman.