Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m going to follow up on my colleague Mr. Bromley’s comments and speak, as well, about the electricity review response, and we are not in collusion.

As Members are aware, the Minister of ITI tabled the government’s response last week and the changes outlined in that report will have a huge impact on power rates for our NWT communities, and I feel it is a significant achievement for this Assembly. Though, Mr. Speaker, I cannot fully endorse the report.

I’m concerned about the philosophy, which underpins the substance of the report, and I have concerns about some of the recommendations. There’s no doubt that most of our residents struggle with the high cost of living and that one of our greatest costs is the cost of power. The plan outlined in the government’s response will positively impact our residents by reducing their cost of living, both at home and at the store.

Mr. Speaker, we’ve missed the golden opportunity that this review process offered us. We had an opportunity to make substantial and real changes to the way our electricity system operates. We could have found substantive efficiencies and reduced the huge subsidies that the government pays out to keep our power costs down, but that we did not do. Instead we did minimal revamping, shuffled the subsidies from one pocket to another and missed a great opportunity to effect real change and to find real and systemic savings.

What am I worried about? A couple of things. Firstly, this is only a two-year plan and in that two years rate riders will be paid off to the tune of about $6 million; taxpayer dollars. Power rates will be frozen, but what increases will be waiting to pounce on us in the fall of 2012? Production costs, fuel, materials and so on never seem to go down, only up, and that can only result in increased power rates. I fear a jump in our power rates at the end of this two-year period. I think we’re going to experience rate shock.

Secondly, there will be no adjustment of the power rates for government customers at this time. I see that as artificially inflating NTPC’s revenues and I ask again what will be the impact on rates and on the system when those are reduced as we are told that they will be?

There are some elements of this plan which are positive, it’s not all bad, but I regret that both the electricity and the NTPC reports did not look for systemic changes which would reduce the cost of power generation and distribution. Instead we have a report that moves money from the government’s right hand to its left hand and which leaves us with an uncertain electrical future.