Mr.
Chairman, as a
government we do realize we need to reduce our footprint and the impact we have on the land and the environment around us and look for ways of reducing that. Yes, as it becomes more and more known, and as publications out there highlight the amount of computers that fall into landfills and the adverse impact they have, it is something we do have to consider.
A lot of this — some history here — goes back to, as Members may recall, Y2K. I believe that was the term used. When governments looked at the potential that major system failures could happen as a result of the design of these systems, many governments across not only Canada but the world had to review their situation and the backup that was needed. Through that exercise, it was realized that as the government of the Northwest Territories, we lacked…. So that if we had a major failure, whether it be one of our facilities that house our equipment or the equipment itself failed, we had little to no backup in those areas. In fact, the last government, as I highlighted earlier, ended up dealing with some of those system failures because we didn't have the appropriate backup.
Unfortunately, even though this is a new environment for doing business, a technical age, some redundancy is required as we proceed with keeping our information intact. We will look forward to working with departments to ensure we're looking at these areas. Extending the lifespan of these is an area we can look at.