Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to follow up on Mr. Bromley’s exchange with the Minister and the reason why he’s stating that possibly there’s no supplier in Norman Wells, for example, or the Sahtu. Because we don’t have the support there. No one’s going to get up and just start putting the wood pellets to the fire and say, come. It’s ludicrous.
We’ve been saying that if you had an initiative to put a wood pellet boiler in one of the communities, like the Fort Good Hope new school, you would have had the suppliers in Good Hope. It would have
been there. I guess I’m moving into an exchange here but you have to get realistic, too, with this type of initiative. That’s what I’m asking this Minister here. If you want to put something in, wood boilers, it takes a couple years, you can get somebody going. They have it in Fort Simpson. Just out at Checkpoint they have a company there putting these wood pellets together. They’re testing it out. They’re testing out what’s the best market they can have. Right now we get them out of Alberta. They used to do this in the Sahtu a long time ago. They used to cut cords of wood for the church and the steamboat. They’re no stranger to it. Even when I was in Old Crow they used to have cords of wood outside the Old Crow school. That’s how they heated the school. If the government said we’re going to do this and we want a supplier in the Sahtu, I think you’re going to have a few people step up and say let’s do it. But it’s got to be a business for them. It’s got to be business viability.
It’s all about money. Interest in their supplier of petroleum but we’re not a supplier of wood pellets. That discussion we’ll have later.
Give us an opportunity to get into this and not just blame the people saying there’s no supplier. Quit blaming us. That’s something that this government needs to know. We will do it if the demand is there, but like I said, all the projects are not around the Sahtu. They’re somewhere else. I want to just tell the Minister that if you give us the opportunity to be a supplier of wood pellets, we would do it. Actually, the people in Good Hope said, we want to get into this business. But they said, why? There’s no wood pellet business. They’re going to go broke. It’s the cart and the horse; which one goes first? You’re putting the cart before the horse here. I think we need to have some more discussion on this here. Put in a little bit of emotion. I take it as being too hard on the Sahtu.