Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d say the energy planning role of this government is one of our most vital roles and, unfortunately, the challenges are so huge that we have made very little progress in this area. I’m very disappointed to see that our funding has continued to decline, I think, $4 million a couple years ago and a couple million last year, and for this current year it’s down another half a million or so.

I think there are some fundamental issues that we should have been able to address that we haven’t. An example, certainly, is that incredibly we are still spewing megawatts of electricity over the falls without it being used. We’re just letting it go into the environment. This, while our people are facing a high cost of living and so on. This is clean energy that’s being produced anyway. That’s really no additional cost. Rather than figuring out how to use

these megawatts of power in the South Slave and figure out a way to reduce our costs, at least in that region where we have it, to me is untenable. We continue to spend millions of dollars as planners, and we have done this for years and years. The only thing we’ve done in terms of hydro where we spent this money, is replace a dam that we bought in a very dilapidated condition a few years before. So I’m very concerned about our investment in energy planning here.

I know there are plans to hook up the system and whatnot and I agree when we can, we need to connect our regions, but certainly to think that we can connect to the South and expect anything other than a commitment to buying coal-produced energy, with all that that means, and sending our money south instead of supporting local energy providers, it’s certainly nonsensical in terms of real, full economic sense. I know there’s an effort now to look at connecting our systems within the Northwest Territories. To me that sounds reasonable, but there is so much that could be done and within the existing, and we know that the South Slave has the demand and yet we continue to spill those megawatts of power. It’s just beyond comprehension.

So I want to express my disappointment in the performance so far. We’ve studied many dams, many projects and I suppose at some point maybe the data we produce will be useful there. But I really wish this government could focus on taking advantage of the stuff that’s before our very eyes instead of pursuing the elusive, so expensive and so megaproject sort of an approach that they’re generally not attainable. They’re not really economic. It’s well demonstrated the smaller the things are, the more economic they are when you bring in full cost accounting and so on. Certainly, the more achievable they are. There is so much we could be doing and I have to admit when it comes to actually doing things on the ground, there’s a lot that’s happening. I think ENR has a lot of good stuff going in biomass and now starting on solar and so on.

Let me start with that. Could I get the Minister’s take on what we can do to turn this around into where we’re planning in a way that actually we can see things implemented at an appropriate scale, living within our means, as the Minister of Finance says, and so on? Thank you.