Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thanks for the opportunity to offer some general comments here. Going through the Minister’s remarks, it’s quite an unusual budget with the changes that are taking place this year. The first thing he mentioned was the $32 million for demolition of the school and the Deh Cho Hall in Simpson. To me, I’m very upset about this. This is extremely poor management. There’s no reason these should be occurring together in the same fiscal year. They should have been spread over. These are really predictable sorts of costs. We know what the extra costs we’re dealing with that other things are causing today. So I think we need a real tune-up in how we deal with major costs like this and start spreading them out and bringing those into our management regime so it’s routine rather than on a last-minute basis.
On the other hand, I think the things we’re doing with starting to capture some of the savings from the energy work we’re doing, I like the idea of bringing all the utilities into one place. Public Works and Services will be clearly in charge of maintenance and the opportunities that brings for standardizing and bringing an energy savings approach with some possible additional savings there and so on. So I want to tip my hat to the planning that has gone into that and moving on that opportunity.
The Minister mentioned settlement maintainer positions that are going to be established, indeterminate positions, and I’d like to be sure that those positions will receive training in energy efficiency and, ideally, opportunities for renewable energy. For example, solar hot water heating and so on, things that we know are quite viable in our communities with off-the-shelf technology. The same would go for the electrician in Inuvik, so we can start taking advantage of those opportunities.
The long-term savings to investment and new owned office space in Yellowknife I think, again, we are looking for those sorts of opportunities and I understand that a large opportunity has been identified there. So I’m looking forward to a discussion on that and, overall, I’m positive on getting that done. I think there will be some sensitivity needed to how that gets carried out, sensitivity to the marketplace and so on and I think we’ll be visiting more about that.
The petroleum products division and a revolving fund, well, servicing the Power Corporation and the residents and so on, I’ve said before it should be
the pellets in the petroleum products division. We need to be switching. To be subsidizing substance that is doing such harm to our land, our future, seems to me somehow to be kind of crazy and we know in fact the Minister outlined the savings that we’ve had with the biomass projects, for example. It’s just completely crazy. So here’s a division that’s got lots of expertise, probably spending lots on maintaining tank farms and cleaning up spills and so on. It could be enjoying those savings and helping out the marketplace by providing a market and I think that should be extended to the Power Corporation, as well, or looking at better ways of doing things.
I want to keep us moving here so I think I’ll just leave it at that and bring out any other specifics during the detail. I appreciate this opportunity again. Thank you.