Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to rise in the House and speak to an initiative that I’ve spoken to on many occasions, and that’s the Inuvik gas situation.

Last week there was a pretty big meeting in Inuvik where there was a lot of concern from the community about business and residential. Yesterday I spoke about eradicating poverty in the Northwest Territories, but with the situation we have going on in Inuvik right now, the operating people at or below the poverty line were having a hard time just making ends meet.

I know that we’ve had this discussion before, where we’ve said people are paying now what other people are paying in the communities and what people are paying for diesel. However, some of these people who switched to natural gas years ago, including this government, are finding that we’re making decisions based on the prices that we were thinking we were going to pay for a longer period of time. Now we’re finding the situation where plans that we’ve made in the past are affecting our financial situation now.

You just have to look at the budget for housing and the amount of money that has increased in terms of money going into housing units.

I’d just like to address that this government has been doing a lot since the situation has come up. I know they’ve been mediating between the Town of Inuvik and Inuvik Gas, and working to supplement this situation that has been really hurting the residents and the businesses of Inuvik.

I guess my next course of action, rather than always hitting the government well now, rather than the oil well or the gas well, is that we have to find ways where we can mitigate the use of the fuel consumption in Inuvik and find ways for people who have been paying high costs of living that can’t actually access some of these alternative energy sources such as biomass, creating a different type of policy. We’re having some double-income homes who want to switch over to biomass but they can’t afford that initial start-up cost.

I’m going to have questions today for the Minister of ENR about the policy, in terms of how we can get

these people on the system, as well as looking at housing and how can Housing regulate the energy consumption with our housing tenants so that the energy and the gas can last a little bit longer in the community of Inuvik. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.