Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First off, I will not be supporting this particular motion. I want to be clear, because I do support environmental initiatives and energy saving projects, but the
difference is I actually support the ones that make sense, and certainly I’m not sure that this motion does do that.
I’ve supported, in the past, things like green bags, light bulbs, CFL adjustments, wood pellet stoves and boilers, promoting them. Even myself, I’m a proud owner of a wood pellet boiler. The thing is, I encourage people to use the opportunities and the tools that avail themselves to them to take on more energy efficient opportunities. I try to be a living example of that particular case.
From a pragmatic approach, I often try to remind people, though, it’s about making sense. We can chase every dream like the rainbow, but the fact is, some are just so unaffordable that we’re doing these things but they just don’t make sense.
I recognize the work that Mr. Bromley is trying to do here by saying, well, we need to spend more money on environmental initiatives, but the fact is, a lot of them just don’t seem to pay out. As I said earlier, I encourage everybody at every opportunity to make environmentally responsible choices to their lifestyle, and I let not an occasion go by without trying to encourage people to live better and smarter and do the right thing that not only is just for them but is for the environment as well.
Part of the issue that I’m raising here today from my perspective is the fact that these initiatives, by and large, need to have some type of payback on investment. Now, I understand the large moral conviction many people have, and sometimes that’s why we make these types of commitments. My wife and I bought a hybrid, not believing that it would financially pay itself out on the bottomline, but we felt it was important it was built on the moral commitment of the type of life and lessons we’re trying to teach not only ourselves, but teach our children. Sometimes, I have to tell you, our kids come home and teach us lessons about doing things better.
I feel that some of these actions that are environmentally focused, the responsibility also has to be the fact that we have to make sure that they’re useful and they actually do pay something back. Can the GNWT afford to spend more money on these energy projects without guarantee of any type of return on our investment? Often we hear the Finance Minister talk about how tight our finances are and how we just heard the status quo budget. I mean, status quo usually means no imagination but my fear is if they had gone with too many environmental projects that weren’t designed to pay back, I mean, who knows what that would cost us and what benefit over the long run.
In my view, we need to start setting achievable goals and meaningful dialogue on this particular case so we can help set targets when we decide that we’re going to make environmental initiatives and they’re actually going to be useful and pay
back. We need to make investments that actually, like I said, have a return on investment.
Previous funding, in my view, certainly was not invested money wisely spent. I think a lot of the projects, although meaning well, didn’t actually show much in return. Sixty million dollars went out to about 20 projects and, certainly, they include some interesting goals, but we certainly spent some money on hydro facilities in Lutselk'e, Whati, Deline, Tulita, Taltson expansion, transmission lines, wind energy, solar power subsidies, and certainly a number of policy reviews. As many Members will remember, we also spent a fair bit of money on smaller projects such as solar power for swimming pools, wood pellet boilers in public buildings and the increased presence of the Arctic Energy Alliance in our communities. For $15 million allocated each year in the 16
th Assembly, the
question of general consumer – and I should say the taxpayer – is always asking, so what was delivered and did we achieve any actual savings on these particular things other than spending $60 million, in total that is.
So as many people know, the NWT Power Corp had to shut down some of their initiatives because they just proved unpractical and certainly not affordable. So would this just be another fund built with great ideals, focus on moralities of how we wish we could do things but they have no payback? When things are tight and we hear about how much more the Power Corporation is going to keep raising our power bills and costing us money, I mean, we have to rethink how we do business.
Yes, we need to spend money on new technologies and at times you’ll even hear me be a supporter of some that are new initiatives, but during these times of restraint, we have to actually worry about what actually works and actually makes money. If we’re just throwing money out the window, we should just be writing cheques to our citizens rather than just spending money on useless projects that don’t actually have a return.
Yes, there are projects that actually make a good return and I’ve seen certain cases where pellet boilers in schools and even at the Legislative Assembly here had a refocus on how we use energy, but this is few and far between. Sixty million dollars didn’t pay for three pellet boilers; it paid for a lot of projects that didn’t work.
So that’s the type of dynamic I’m talking about. We have projects that we know can work and bring a return on the bottom line, and we have a lot of projects we hope will do something that have no effect other than costing us money.
I’ll return to some of the examples here. The Lutselk’e mini hydro turned out to have such mega costs, and even the Taltson expansion originally intended to send power to diamond mines was shelved. Even the price tag on Bluefish is
somewhere around $37 million, although we continue to pour money into policy reviews, with very little return. The question is: How much more money?
I recognize Mr. Bromley’s point about continuing to spend money on power subsidies and that does become a burden on the system by and large and that’s not right, but we should be really asking ourselves what makes money in the sense of a return, because it’s important to use our money wisely. Yet again, what little money we seem to have. I mean, whenever you hear an initial project asked by anybody on the Member’s side, there’s never any money, but boy he’s got $60 million that he got covered up really fast by the last Cabinet and although it may not technically be in the Minister’s riding, it sure looked like it from our point of view.
So in spite of all these green initiatives and intentions, Norman Wells, as we know, and even Inuvik have lost their natural gas sources and the GNWT is now totally unprepared on how to implement a viable energy program to supplement the diesel.
I’ve been using many occasions to remind different folks that maybe the GNWT needs to do a full accounting on what the Inuvik gas problem will cost us. Maybe we should become an investor in the spur line just outside of Inuvik, and maybe we could own a new gas utility and be an investor rather than switching our assets over to diesel. There could be an opportunity that actually brings us money.
The argument for $60 million more investment, like many people ask, what will it do for the cost of living of the average person; a person who sits at the table, looks across and sees their kids and asks themselves how are they going to pay the power bill this month or how are they going to pay the heating bill? I have yet to see that really change anywhere.
The only people that are feeding, and I should stress feeding well, are the contractors who are getting the contracts to these particular projects and policy, because they’re eating well at $60 million.
So power rates, as I said earlier, will continue to rise and it’s going to be in the high twenties over the next three years when we add it all up together. I mean, what dynamic have we really changed? Some of our disincentive to some of these great ideas from working is the reality that our population is small and our communities are spread out. That becomes a challenge. If we want to make good commitments on good moral values, then that’s really what we should be saying, is we’re doing this, it doesn’t matter what it costs, but it seems like the right thing to do and that’s why we’re doing it. I mean, let’s say that. But to fool the average person by saying don’t worry, all these things have a return on the bottom line, I think we’re misleading the
constituents out there because, really, a lot of them just don’t seem to have that type of return.
Another $60 million, in my view, unprepared; it’s just a blank cheque. I’m all for doing something right, but again the payback on any of these projects is skeptical on the best day, and I’m really concerned about that. Again, I’m about spreading the money around when it makes sense, and by all means we have to make sure that we get projects out there into our communities and to our regions that help people lower their costs.
Mr. Speaker, I don’t have to lecture you on how expensive power bills are in your communities, and I have to wonder to myself, the only time we ever lower the power costs in those northern communities was by reaching in the power rates. It was a policy shift. You know, that was a piece of paper. How much money did that cost in comparison to spending $60 million on a new process?
We have experienced many successes, and those small-scale successes such as the wood pellet boilers as I had pointed out do make sense. Maybe we should be focusing in on what we do well, and let’s continue doing what we do well until we actually can figure out how we can do something else well.
I know this summer they launched a solar panel in Fort Simpson, and I applaud the thinking of this style of initiatives but, again, back to how much do these things cost and is there a real payback,
There is wide public support for alternative energies and I welcome that support on any type of project, but people always ask themselves is there a return on their particular tax dollar and that tends to be the issue. Investing more money in this particular case may be wrongly put. I mean, my colleague just keeps calling it a modest $5 million. It’s almost like it’s falling out of his pocket. He’s got so much money he can call it modest. From my point of view, $5 million is a lot of money.
If we want to invest money wisely, I’d say let’s put it into early childhood education. That’s where we’ll have a real impact on our future and on the environment, by being able to fully fund schools properly. Early childhood education, to me that is the energy of the future. That is the resource we should be stoking continually.
Local measures such as community gardens, I welcome and I certainly support those types of investments. I welcome further investment in recycling programs, and I’ve brought up even things like tire shredding and e-waste returns, different energy type of initiatives and sometimes recycling initiatives that we can get some payback from. But we cannot afford to risk $60 million of the taxpayers’ money without some type of measured result. People fear about what’s happening for the
future as far as power rates. It shows how irresponsible can we be with this money.
So, in closing, I want to say I can’t support the reinstatement of this fund without some clear strategies as to how we can actually make real change that affects the bottom line. I’m not against energy initiatives, and that shouldn’t be mixed here and misunderstood. It’s about energy initiatives that don’t have a return on investment that affect the bottom line of the everyday taxpayer.
We often hear about how we try to do things for the cost of living and yet again the results bucket seems to be empty. I look, it’s hollow. There are no results there. Again, as I said earlier of course, is the fact that the only real change we’ve had on bottom line cost of living is the rejigging of power rates. It’s just shifted the burden around on people as opposed to really solving the bigger problems.
So if we have initiatives that make sense, I’ll be there and I’ll be there in spades tramping their value. But until then, I don’t want a blank strategy, a blank cheque going out with no idea. Like I said earlier, the only people winning and feeding well are the contractors. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.