Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the committee members for the comments that were raised and concerns and issues that they have brought to our attention.

First of all, I will just say briefly that the program that we initiated for settlement maintainers is something that seems to be working quite well. We have been able to fill most of the positions. There is still one position in the community of Wrigley where

there is an outstanding vacancy. We are going back to re-advertise and see if we can find somebody that will fill that void and help us with the maintenance.

The issue that has been brought forward by all Members is around the DCN. There has been, over the years, some concern over the growth. We are seeing growth really move forward progressively. I think it is around 30 percent every year. Our staff is working quite hard. Most of the growth is driven by the schools’ curriculum traffic and some of the health diagnostics data. While it has really placed demand on the bandwidth, there is also a benefit on it, as Mr. Yakeleya has pointed out, that in that work is now transporting critical information which is really in line with health and social services’ priorities. We have looked at options of how to improve the service. We have a new contract that is being looked at. We are looking at ways and we have some options of addressing the demand placed on the system and we are looking at offloading some of the schools, but not all the schools, onto a different, less expensive, local Internet facility. That seems to be working well. For health right now, we have to, because of security reasons, maintain their services on our program. We certainly would like to provide a more detailed briefing to committee at any given time that there is opportunity to do so. This whole area is quite complex and there are a lot of things happening, a lot of positive initiatives that we would like to share with Members.

Mr. Jacobson had raised the issue of the shop in Ulukhaktok. That is something we are looking to address. We are not sure right now on the comment made regarding gas and Northern Stores. That is not something we do at this point. Our program for PPD only operates in communities where there is no local fuel provider and no independent business doing so. We have not had any discussions with Northern Store to provide them with fuel.

The question was raised by MLA Bisaro on infrastructure process change. Our results, after a couple of years now working the system, indicate that is working well. We have seen improvements on cost. We have had more consultation and also we are experiencing a lot better contracts that are made in the schedule that are set out for the contractors. We are not planning to expand our maintenance program to all of the communities as was requested by MLA Bisaro. Right now we are looking at the communities where the volume of work warrants a maintainer and where the challenges are of getting private contractors. In most cases we are using a mix of both maintainers and contractors. It seems to be working well. We are also attracting now, through our consolidation of our utilities, the expenditures. We have better baseline information. We are able to compile that

information. At the current time we are using that information to identify facilities that are using large volumes of fuel or other utilities and allow us to decide where we would invest in either a replacement or an upgrade or an energy-efficient alternate energy heating or things of that nature.

The MLA for Nahendeh had asked about the Wrigley position. Again, I will just state that we had an individual that was interested. It didn’t work out, so we are going to be advertising that position again. He had also asked about the maintenance of our vehicles along with DOT being done with the Department of Transportation. We are using this system in the community of Fort Simpson because we have a mechanic there and it is cost efficient for us to utilize this individual. If we don’t maximize his time, it would be hard to justify his position. We do go outside of the government to private sources once we have overloaded our capacity with our mechanic. We did go out to a standing offer agreement and had no response. At this point, we would like to keep the system in place. We feel we are meeting all of our obligations.

We are also working in our attempt to consolidate maintenance and maximize our efficiencies. We wanted to set up expertise and identify expertise within our own ranks too, work in the area of energy efficiency and that is something that we are working towards. I think we are doing quite well. We have also been asked by MLA Bromley to consider sharing information on some of the findings that we have on some of our best practices. Although we are more than willing to do so, we also have to keep in mind that we have limited resources and it may be something that we can work close... I mean, we do work close with other departments and agencies, but for us to make that as a... For us to act as a resource to everyone is going to be very difficult. We were also asked about expanding the PPD to include pellets. We had initiated a study, we are just about there. We are about 90 percent complete. We should have the results sometime in April for Members for review.

Mr. Chairman, MLA Beaulieu asked about setting a target to have apprentices with all the tradespeople throughout the departments. I guess that is something, I guess, the government should look at seriously. In our department we have a number of positions now, things are working quite well and to expand the program would, of course, be very dependent on available funding and we’ll continue to seek that appropriate investment.

We were also asked about a couple of capital projects in Mr. Yakeleya’s riding regarding a shop and we have done a study that looked at all of our maintenance shops and right now are considering what we can reasonably bring forward in terms of replacements or building new for consideration for the next capital plan, so that is something that we

will be doing over the summer months. He also asked about the Tulita tank farm. Mr. Chairman, that was approved in our capital budget this past fall. It is also the same with the Norman Wells Health Centre. That still falls under the responsibility of the Department of Health, so maybe we can ask the Member to direct his questions to the Department of Health on that front. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.