Thanks, Mr. Chair. I want to say that I agree with this motion and I agree with my colleague who’s spoken already. I have been struggling with the energy initiatives as presented to us for the ‘13-14 budget. They do not make a serious inroad into reducing our energy costs. There are a number of them, but some of them, I think, are minimal enough that we can put the money into a better project and I think this is one such project.

The Arctic Energy Alliance, in their proposal, which I think Mr. Bromley mentioned, estimates that there’s about 1,000 electric hot water heaters in thermal communities and they estimate it would cost us about $3 million to replace them all. There are programs out there. There is a program out there right now that provides a rebate if people replace their electric hot water heater with an oil-fired hot water heater, but nobody takes the challenge, particularly in the small communities where there is probably no capacity, no trained technician who can put a new one in and there’s an initial fairly high cost for people that they don’t want to take on.

In my mind, we’re talking about $3 million which either could be new money or a combination of new money and taking some of the initiatives that we already have and re-profiling the money from those. It’s money well spent, as Mr. Bromley said. The payback period is extremely short and I also have to agree with him in terms of the money that we’re putting into subsidies for electricity rates. I mentioned it the other day, and I have to mention it again, it’s a huge amount of money. We are going to be doing it again for another couple of years, and at the end of it, we still haven’t done anything to reduce our electricity consumption. This is one way to do that. The oil-fired burners we put in are going

to last for a very long time. It’s not like these are going to be one or two years and they are going to be gone. They will probably last longer than the electric water heaters, from what I am told.

So to the motion and to showing our people that we’re doing something really concrete, something that’s going to benefit them and, at the same time, benefit the GNWT, I think this is an excellent way to go. If we consider the total amount of money that we’re talking about, $3 million, even if it’s $5 million out of a $1.6 billion budget, it’s peanuts. The fact that we’re going to recoup the money through our subsidy, going to recoup the money through reduced energy costs over the next two years and then, from then on, we’re saving money big time, again I think Mr. Bromley was the one who said it’s a no-brainer. I totally agree. So I encourage my colleagues to also support this motion. Thank you.