Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Every morning in committee we discuss the previous day’s business, so I’d like to talk a little bit about yesterday’s business in this House. We’ll call it previous day’s business.
I’m disappointed that when the Members of this House passed a motion suggesting that we could possibly look at some money to put into the conversion of electric hot water heaters to diesel hot water heaters as a means of some energy
efficiency on this side of the House, that it was met with such disdain by the Minister of ENR.
I carefully read over Hansard, and actually you cannot read in the actual words the tone of what we felt over here after we passed that motion. Of course, we know we’ve been through six months of business plans, of course we know this wasn’t brought up before, but as Members on this side of the House, we do have the right to bring forth what we consider to be, collectively, a good idea at any time that we want to.
The Minister was clearly… Well, I don’t know what the word is; I have to be careful here. It appeared that the Minister was annoyed by our suggestion, and I do not appreciate that. Yes, there is possibility of LNG in the future. Yes, there may be already many good initiatives going on, but this was a little idea that we came up with up on this side of the House and I felt like the response from the government, vis-a-vis the Minister of ENR, was very dismissive, I felt like the answer was condescending in the sense that we know we can’t pull out the power subsidy from our constituents right now, suggesting that that that’s the only place where we could get a little bit of money to change over electric hot water heaters to diesel hot water heaters.
Oh, well, let’s go back to the PUB then and let’s cut the subsidy for all the power rates in the Northwest Territories. That’s not an alternative. There’s lots of money being spent other places in this government other than with the power subsidy, where, if we wanted to find a little bit of money to do this, we could do so. But to throw that out there was almost like, oh, my gosh, no, we can’t do that, I mean, it struck fear in the heart of people to think that we as a group would possibly support such a pullback on that power subsidy. You couldn’t do that on short notice and in a rash kind of a way.
All I’m saying is we do have the odd idea over here, we like to put it forward. Thanks for the respect. If you could just give us the time of day. Thank you.