Thank you, Mr. Chair. Under
Grants and Contributions I see that there’s $3 million going to the Taltson River hydroelectric for some feasibility studies and whatnot. Although I agree that the Taltson is clearly an area that we should be looking into expanding and that there’s lots of opportunities for it, I am curious exactly
what’s being done in respect to the feasibility study and whether or not a decision has already been made as to where power lines may flow from Taltson — whether they’re going to be flowing northeast around the east arm of Great Slave Lake up to the diamond mines and stopping dead or whether or not there are still options for consideration for maximizing Taltson.
This could help to actually support the people of the Northwest Territories by possibly extending from Hay River across our fancy new bridge up through Providence, Behchoko and creating some grid systems, maybe gridding over to Yellowknife — creating some grids and therefore creating some redundancy, helping reduce costs of power in our communities. Then following our existing winter road system up to the mines in order to ease construction, given that they’ll be along a road rather than just plunked out in the middle of the tundra.