Mr. Speaker, the challenges before us in terms of climate change and the greenhouse emissions have certainly been brought to the forefront of people in the last couple of years, especially with the winter roads and the ice crossings. Even being in Fort Providence last weekend…. I talked about being on the river with my father-in-law. He set a net, and he was saying, “You know, at this time of the year we should have ice coming down the river here. How come there’s no ice on the river? The weather has really been changed quite a lot for us.”
We know our challenges as leaders in the community. The elders having a difficult time in the evening: what kind of weather is it going to be the next day in terms of reading the weather? Climate change is right in our face.
I want to say thank you to the Member for continuing to raise the issue here in terms of the challenges, which for us are very true in many different aspects.
Mr. Speaker, our biggest polluters — as Mr. Krutko, the Member for Mackenzie Delta, talked about — are the diamond mines and the amount of traffic that comes through Yellowknife to bring the fuel up to the diamond mines so they can produce diamonds in the Northwest Territories. Two big factors, in terms of the greenhouse emissions here, are the diamond mines and the trucks that come up to deliver supplies to them. I think this motion should be looked at again in terms of how we tackle these two big issues.
The NWT Hydro Strategy talks about the diamond mines. They talk about putting a road into the diamond mines to reduce the amount of traffic in the North. Things like that should be really looked at.
DOT is one of our biggest contributors in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. I know they have done some work in terms of how they have reduced emissions by their use of the facilities in the North and by the number of vehicles they have on the road here. That’s something that should strongly come back to this government, talking about how we reduce the transportation initiative in terms of eliminating some of the greenhouse gas here.
I have an issue with this, because in some of our smaller communities there is no proper garage in terms of looking at how we use our vehicles. If we want a vehicle, sometimes our roads are not equipped for those vehicles. In my communities they talk about the use of vehicles, and what’s needed in there, as you said, is the F-150. Sometimes we have large families, and the high
cost of living makes it so that we all need to travel to some of the communities to do some shopping.
Mr. Speaker, in my community we don’t have very many roads. On some of the small roads in our communities we travel around and around and around. In other regions they can go to different areas, but they are only lucky when the window opens up in January until the end of March, just to get out here.
A two tier system should look at all transportation. Look at the barges that come down the Mackenzie River and how much diesel they use in NTCL super barges arriving in the North. They use a lot of that. Look at the airplanes. We need to look at a lot.
I understand where the Member is going, but first I think we should look at it closely in terms of how we go about it. What we need to look at is how this is impacting some of our small communities and have some time to think about this.
Mr. Speaker, with the price of gas $1.69 a litre in Tulita, when that price went up again, a lot of people were talking about how we get fuel efficiency vehicles in lieu of the gas guzzlers to be had. We talked to the companies who sell these vehicles down at Hay River and Inuvik. There is a very fine balance in terms of personal choice and consciousness of climate change.
Again, we have large families. They all want to travel together. I don’t think we can afford another vehicle to travel with them. We thought the things that need to be considered…. I think breaks should be given to the people who are on the winter road system. They should get a break and a discount on registration for travelling on that road system. Something like that should be looked at.
Mr. Speaker, at this time I’m not going to support the motion. I think it’s a worthy cause, but we should have some more discussions. I think our people are going to be impacted in our communities if we start implementing this. I know if we start implementing this discussion here, a lot of investment can go into discussion and research. I think it needs to be brought to the community or to the House for some more discussion before we look into something like that. It could be beneficial to the people in the North. Right now I think the diamond mines and the trucking companies that are using more should be the ones who should be paying the types of prices, if we’re looking at something like this.