Thank you, Madam Chair. I find this department intriguing and interesting, working in an area that has definite challenges but real clear opportunities. One of the opportunities and good work that’s being done is the adoption of the building standards; it’s 25 percent better than the Model National Energy Building Code, if I’ve got that term right. I appreciate that. The opportunity I see is to spread that to our communities, ideally starting with our Department of Municipal and Community Affairs. I’m wondering what opportunities this department has taken in working to get their sister department MACA up to speed on this.
The other area that I see this department doing a lot of good work in is the adoption of renewable energy, in almost every case at cost savings. Again, good work in developing a revolving fund which captures the benefits of this work, the savings from this work, and reinvests this on behalf of the taxpayers and the residents of the Northwest Territories into a fund to continue that good work. That’s another opportunity that I see for other departments, if this department could work to spread that cultural knowledge.
One of the big ones I’ve talked about quite a number of times is the opportunity to undercut the need for very expensive fossil fuel containment and storage. Again, these often run in the millions of dollars, as I suspect they do this year. Whenever there are clear opportunities to reduce the need for those fossil fuels, and similarly reduce the need for the very expensive storage and containment that that engenders. Of course, I’m not sure what the department has been able to achieve in this area because I only see the activity when they do build new containment and so on. There it is clear when it is community structures that they have not done the work that I feel they have the opportunity to do in concert, of course, with their sister departments and the communities themselves. The reason I speak on this is because we do have broad
government goals of new employment, a revved up local economy in our small communities as well as our large communities, the overall reduction in cost to government, and of course the reduction in environmental costs, especially today, as we know from all the science, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
I just want to take this opportunity; I will be bringing these points home with some specifics as we go through division by division here today. I did want to be sure to again compliment the department, and urge them to continue and spread the cultural knowledge that they’re developing. I will be asking again for, if it’s possible, a summary as we have been provided in past years of the greenhouse gas savings, the reduction in the costs or the financial savings, and any information that the department collects in terms of the employment and the development of the industry of renewable energy, energy efficiency, recovered waste energy. This is an area that I know there are good things happening but we haven’t seen much for stats on it.
Each time we bring a market, for example for wood pellets, into a community, that begins to deal with the logistical challenges and costs for a homeowner or a business within that community to take advantage of that same energy source and allow them to springboard forward to similar savings and so on.
That’s it. I just wanted to highlight those and I would appreciate any response from the Minister.