Thank you, Mr. Chair. My colleague
Mrs.
Groenewegen said something that I was
thinking about while I was listening to all the discussions on the power — what’s in it for us?
Being from the northern part of the Northwest Territories, I heard lots of comments about the southern part of the Northwest Territories and what benefit it might have to them. My question, again, is: what’s in it for the northern part of the Northwest Territories other than a Taltson Hydro rider that’s probably going to show up on our power bills? We have every other rider that’s there. We’ve got 20 to 25 per cent of the population from the Sahtu. I see the figure $3 million here. There are obviously a lot of people up there paying taxes that are going toward expansion of Taltson Hydro to serve the mines. It just doesn’t make sense.
We need to know that there’s an opportunity here for this grid to go farther north. We talk about cost all the time — how much it’s going to cost to do this, how much it’s going to cost for that. At the end of the day you’ve got all the northern communities paying top penny for their power — $0.56 alone in Inuvik, compared to…. I’m not quite sure what they pay down here. Nothing close to that. Colville Lake’s got the highest, I think, in the Northwest Territories.
We start talking legacy projects here and supplying power to the mines and actually going around the route I’ve heard a couple of my colleagues talking about, where it’s going to miss some of the other communities if they choose to go a route along the other side of the lake. I sit here and I listen to this. If I had the stomach, I’d make a motion to delete $3 million.
It’s just so frustrating to sit here and listen to all this discussion. I think there was some talk a few years ago of Bear Rivers hydro serving the northern part of the Northwest Territories. I’d like to know where that’s at. I just can’t express my frustration from listening to all this talk down here about spending $3 million of taxpayers’ money. We’ve got businesses, individuals up in Inuvik, the northern part of the Territories, paying through the teeth for their power. Yet we can drop 3 million bucks just like that to supply power to the mines — and going the opposite direction while we’re doing it.
Mr. Chair, I didn’t have any questions there. I just needed to vent a bit. It’s 7:20; I’ve been sitting here all day and listening to all the discussion going on about this. When are we going to stop making decisions like this? I can see a Taltson rider on the bills up in Inuvik and the Beaufort-Delta. I can see it. We have riders for everything else, and this is just something that I really have an issue with. If there’s anything we can do….
We talk cost again in supplying or running grids up to the northern part of the Northwest Territories. It’s possible. I just wanted to express my frustration, Mr. Chairman, at dropping $3 million to supply power to the mines, which don’t even take a lot of people from the northern part of the Northwest Territories anyway. I can maybe try and justify this if we had a couple of people working up at the mines. There might be a couple. I think I know two of them. I think that’s the only two. They bring more people in from the east coast than they do from a couple hundred kilometres away, even though people do want to work.
I’m really starting to go off on a rabbit trail here. I better stop.