This is page numbers 1977 – 2026 of the Hansard for the 17th Assembly, 4th Session. The original version can be accessed on the Legislative Assembly's website or by contacting the Legislative Assembly Library. The word of the day was chair.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

David Ramsay

David Ramsay Kam Lake

Yes please, Madam Chair.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

The Chair

The Chair Jane Groenewegen

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. Is the committee agreed?

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

Some Hon. Members

Agreed.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

The Chair

The Chair Jane Groenewegen

Thank you. I’ll ask the Sergeant-at-Arms to please escort the witnesses to the table.

Mr. Ramsay, for the record, could you please introduce your witnesses.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

David Ramsay

David Ramsay Kam Lake

Thank you, Madam Chair. To my left I’ve got Mr. Peter Vician, deputy minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment, and to my right, Ms. Nancy Magrum, director of shared services, finance and administration, ITI and Environment and Natural Resources. Thank you.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

The Chair

The Chair Jane Groenewegen

Thank you, Minister Ramsay. Industry, Tourism and Investment, activity summary, minerals and petroleum resources, grants and contributions, contributions, $745,000.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

Some Hon. Members

Agreed.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

The Chair

The Chair Jane Groenewegen

Agreed. We are on page 12-18, Industry, Tourism and Investment. Agreed?

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

Some Hon. Members

Agreed.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

The Chair

The Chair Jane Groenewegen

Thank you. Page 12-19, Industry, Tourism and Investment, information item, mineral and petroleum resources, active positions.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

Some Hon. Members

Agreed.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

The Chair

The Chair Jane Groenewegen

Agreed. Moving on to page 12-21, activity summary, energy, operations expenditure summary, $1.679 million. Mr. Bromley.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

Bob Bromley

Bob Bromley Weledeh

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.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

The Chair

The Chair Jane Groenewegen

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister Ramsay.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

David Ramsay

David Ramsay Kam Lake

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I thank the Member for his comments. I certainly appreciate his take on things, but we are making progress. I’m convinced we are making some progress here. We’re getting close to the end of negotiations on devolution.

We continue to talk to industry at every opportunity about power from Taltson. We need transmission, we need a very sizeable investment in the transmission lines. I know there’s been a lot of talk about the interconnect on the grid north and south, and I believe that can happen with that type of investment and it should happen. I think that’s something that we should certainly strive for. The government is working hard on trying to achieve that objective. We do need to plan. I mean, these things just don’t materialize. You don’t pull $700 million or $800 million out of thin air. We need to plan. We need to have a plan that we can target, we can get the money, get the funding and the customers. I mean, it’s all about having customers at the end of the day and a place to sell that power.

So we continue to work on that through MECC and the Premier’s leadership of MECC and Minister Miltenberger. We are making progress. It might seem to some that we’re not moving fast enough, we need more money, obviously, but our belief is we’re going to continue to move forward and make this work. After devolution there’s probably going to be a reorganization. As far as coordination goes, there might be different models that are looked at. So that remains to be seen, but from a coordination perspective, energy is still under MECC and the guidance of the MECC committee. So we continue to, again, ensure that this file is moving forward and my belief is that it is moving forward. Thank you.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

Bob Bromley

Bob Bromley Weledeh

I have to say I am disappointed in the Minister’s response. Transmission lines are at least $750,000 a kilometre, typically more, and in our environment probably more. That’s not what I’m talking about. We’ve been talking about that for decades. We can’t do that. We don’t have the money. The Minister said it himself. I agree with the Minister; we do not have the money. What we do have are customers. All of the South Slave.

Everybody uses energy. We heat our homes, we drive our vehicles, et cetera. Arctic Energy Alliance studies once again have demonstrated, for example, that the entire community of Fort Resolution could use a good amount of that power efficiently with ground source heat pumps, for example, to heat all their buildings, take one unit of electricity, produce four units of heat, and I would imagine the same is true for Fort Smith and Hay River where we have done a few sort of token projects, maybe a couple.

Clearly, the market is there, the energy is there. To think that, I keep saying we’re 43,000 people, 41,000, whatever. Let’s live within our means. Let’s adjust the scale of our thinking to where we actually benefit people where it’s possible, rather than pursuing these distant projects. We have $1.7 million, roughly, in energy planning. Will the Minister commit to looking at where it’s possible to get things on the ground soon in a scale that suits

our communities and reflects the size of our communities and realizes the opportunities we have?

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

David Ramsay

David Ramsay Kam Lake

I appreciate the Member’s comments. Those are the type of comments that we’re looking for as we advance the discussion on energy through the Energy Plan.

We recently had the energy charrette. Those are the types of things and comments that we need to hear. We are going to have to present alternatives and options, new options, on how we get this done. I look forward to that discussion. We have to continue moving in the right direction and, again, through planning that’s how we’re going to arrive at the alternatives and make some decisions on where we go next. That has to happen. I thank the Member for his comments and I appreciate his comments on the matter.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

The Chair

The Chair Jane Groenewegen

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. Mr. Dolynny.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

Daryl Dolynny

Daryl Dolynny Range Lake

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just to continue on the efforts from my colleague from Weledeh. I think we’re onto something here and I do realize that we have limited funds and there’s been a lot of austerity means to have a prudent budget before us. However, the concern I think many of us have, as you hear, is our energy costs and the costs associated with the cost of living. These are paramount questions that are asked time and time again, not only in the House but anywhere we go as Regular Members or as Members of the House.

The concern I have is that less than a year ago, in 2011-2012, we had $5.5 million of sunsets. A lot of the sunsets in this initiative were hydro initiatives. There was the Lutselk’e mini-hydro, there was an anti-Hydro Strategy, there was a Sahtu hydro assessment. These comprised a large part of that $5.5 million. Yet, as I said in one of my comments on the opening statement, our Hydro Strategy, in terms of our significant change that we need to do as a society to mitigate our use of fossil fuels, is very lax in this budget. In fact, we’ve been talking about hydro initiatives or strategies for the last two years. We don’t really see it again this year.

Can the Minister indicate when we will see the full investment in hydro and to coordinate that with, obviously, the transmission line strategy that we keep hearing about, especially since the charrette is now over?

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

The Chair

The Chair Jane Groenewegen

Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Mr. Ramsay.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

David Ramsay

David Ramsay Kam Lake

Thank you, Madam Chair. I thank the Member for his comments. They’re spot on. That’s exactly what we’re trying to achieve here. We’ve got the Hydro Strategy rolled up with the Energy Plan. We have to get those alternatives. We have to get that investment back. It’s through the

planning that we’re going to get there. Like Mr. Bromley, I thank Mr. Dolynny for bringing these issues up. We will get there. I know it might seem like a long way away, but we are working toward these solutions and we will continue to work toward the solutions through the planning.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

Daryl Dolynny

Daryl Dolynny Range Lake

I do appreciate the Minister earmarking the need. I guess the question is when. If he has the ability to ask that, it would be nice for the House to know what the master plan is behind it. More importantly, we found out yesterday through our deliberations that through the Opportunities Fund this government has roughly $7 million parked, for what I really don’t know. I would assume it’s for initiatives. If so, I would say that this is possibly a really good initiative to invest this money in. Maybe if we can get an answer as to if this is not a good initiative, what initiative is the money that $7 million or so in this Opportunities Fund doing and what is it earmarked for?

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

The Chair

The Chair Jane Groenewegen

Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. It’s a bit of a change of topic from a budgetary point of view. Mr. Ramsay.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

David Ramsay

David Ramsay Kam Lake

Thank you, Madam Chair. I thank the Member for the suggestion. Yesterday I mentioned that the remaining balance in the NWT Opportunities Fund is earmarked for economic pursuits in the territory. I haven’t seen a proposal. I know the department is working on a proposal on where and how that remaining balance should be spent and whether or not it’s on hydro, I would have to go to the deputy minister. We haven’t seen a plan come through FMB and that should be coming through FMB and hitting my desk, hopefully, sometime very soon. As I mentioned yesterday, when that happens our hope is to be able to share it with Members as soon as we get that plan. We’re still in the process of trying to find out the best way to proportion that $7 million.

Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters
Consideration in Committee of the Whole of Bills and Other Matters

Daryl Dolynny

Daryl Dolynny Range Lake

By no means do I want to direct the spending of Cabinet. The suggestion is if we’re looking for new monies and new opportunities, that’s basically why I posed the question. Here’s an opportunity to put much needed funds to really have a true impact on the cost of living here for the Northwest Territories.

Just one other question with respect to this energy budget and everything. The NWT power system has been discussed a number of times here in the House, and the formulation of a plan, grid efficiencies or grid expansion. Can the Minister indicate, if this is entirely an important focus for government, is that reflected in this current budget, and if so, where is it in this budget?