Mr.

Speaker, I too am very

concerned about the high cost of power in our small communities.

I think I have a record of dedicating a lot of my time, personal energy and interest in working with small communities to try to address this issue in creative ways.

Currently, we do subsidize residential and commercial use of power in all our communities, diesel-generated communities especially, to the rate of the first 700 kilowatt-hours per month, and so on, for residents.

I believe that the average residential use remains at or below that figure, and in fact, energy efficiency has helped residents to remain below that level, especially now, with the rebates, the various incentives and education for more energy-efficient appliances and so on. I’m optimistic that can continue, and continue to help our residents in small communities.

I am concerned that a levelized rate structure will hide the real costs in the communities and hinder efforts to replace those high-cost diesel-generated power systems with cheaper and more responsible alternative-energy systems. Hopefully, that can be mitigated, and if we do go to a levelized rate, I want to retain the knowledge of what the real costs are so that we continue to focus our efforts on replacing those systems with other systems that are cheaper and better.

It’s a very complicated and complex system, the whole business of electrical rates. I noticed that we have 19 diesel-powered communities. Current rates

are from 61 cents to $2.34 per kilowatt-hour. Therefore, I assume that the costs, once levelized, would be something around 80-plus cents. That means, for a number of communities, and particularly the larger communities, the rates will go up — significantly, in some cases — so I’m hoping all those communities are in line and in support of this before we go forward.

I am also concerned about one of the side-effects, and that is the attempt to use energy more efficiently. There has already been, for example, a call from the community of Whati, where there is a system to replace hot water heaters with more efficient hot water heaters, but there has already been a call saying, “Can we drop this program if we're going to go to a levelized rate structure?” I think we need to be cognizant of that possibility as we move forward, and not sort of do in the programs that we already have going.

Finally, I suspect, because of our small communities, we have a larger number of government institutions than there are commercial customers. Those government institutions are paying often a high rate and helping. It’s sort of an indirect subsidy for keeping rates reasonable. I’m concerned that because they’re a larger part of that, if we levelize, they will actually be the big winners in this. If we do go forward again, we need to be sure that we’re not shifting costs from government to the commercial users and so on. As I say, it gets to be quite a complex situation. I am totally committed to protecting our consumers and our public, especially in our small communities.

Finally, again I think I see a creative way to address the very high power rates in our small communities. I would like to see us move forward with systems where the power is generated locally from local resources and using local labour and building up our capacity at the same time. I totally believe that’s doable, and I want to see some creativity, a commitment from this government to creative solutions, on that standpoint. We’d have true savings to our small-community residents — savings where we’d also contribute to the local economic development and skill development and so on, as well as, of course, environmental benefits along the way. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.