Are there investment opportunities here? Will the government make money on this? Thank you.

Thank you. We’re looking at two things here, but we’re going to be, from the start and on into the future, a major partner in this if we go out to Aboriginal governments. Once the debt is paid off it will generate revenue. What we’re looking at is what would be a more modest than would be normal return on investment so that we can make our best efforts to keep the cost of service into the communities as reasonable as possible, which we think will generate a longer-term benefit and get us more customers. So, yes, there is going to be revenue generation and it’s also going to have

some broader economic impacts. The Member talks about will we look at full cost accounting, and full cost impacts and benefits to the communities where they will have significant, we believe, opportunities in each community. Thank you.

Thank you. Yes, the Minister is outlining many of the reasons that I support this project, but I’m striving for transparency here, as I’m sure he realizes. So, yes, this will generate revenues once it’s paid off. I’ve had a lot of investments on the basis of that. Some of them manage to get paid off and others didn’t. How long do you think, is there a forecast on paying this off? I realize in a full costing accounting approach that, in fact, there are many benefits that should accrue very early on the moment that things are hooked up here. Thank you.

Thank you. We’re projecting a fairly aggressive repayment schedule of about 10 years.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Mr. Bromley, your time is expired. Let me know if you need back on. I have Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have to start with my pet peeve and that’s the amount of money that’s in “other.” I talked about this a lot. I thought we’d gotten rid of that, Mr. Minister, and I understand the explanation. But if it’s an amount that’s $50,000 or $200,000 then it probably isn’t too much, but when we have an “other” of $13 million, although I appreciate that $8 million of it is the debt, it’s a little difficult to sort of look at the budget and kind of go yeah, yeah, we just have $13 million of undescribed money. I’ll just leave that at that.

I wanted to talk a bit about insurance and self-insurance programs as listed under the activity description. What self-insurance programs do we run or do we have? Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. For that we’ll go to Mr. Aumond.

I appreciate Mr. Aumond’s efforts to try to get rid of “other.” With regard to our GNWT assets, we are responsible for them so we are self-insuring our own assets, but there are always risks when we have assets and the risk of loss. I think there’s a program called Property Impairment Reporting Program for GNWT buildings. Could I get confirmation that that is a program that we use to assess risk on our GNWT assets?

I just want to follow up. In terms of risk management, do we feel comfortable that we have a really good handle on all of our buildings, all of our GNWT assets in terms of the insurance risk and risk of loss, I guess for lack of a better way of putting it?

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We are reasonably happy. There are many things we don’t control when it comes to risk management. For example, the majority of our communities are in the middle of the Boreal Forest. There are more and more extreme weather events across the land. The whole concept of stationarity, which is the predictability of those types of occurrences, has all but disappeared. The insurance business, in fact, no longer looks at stationarity because it makes forecasting and doing insurance, and making projections almost impossible. Given a number of those broader major variables, we believe we have a reasonable handle on the issue of risk management.

My next question has to do with assets which have been downloaded, so to speak, from GNWT to municipalities. As municipalities have taken over their own control of their communities, many buildings have been devolved from GNWT down to the municipalities. In terms of insurance and risk management of those buildings, do we have any hand in that or is that totally the responsibility of the municipality?

We worked with communities to set up an insurance program for the communities and we invest money in that. A number of years ago we were all being collectively put in the poorhouse by the usurious insurance rates companies were charging, and we went to a self-financing one in the North and we invest in that. It’s cost effective. It’s done through NWTAC.

Just one last question. The Minister just said that we still put money into NORCIX to the NWT Self-Insurance Program. I thought we had stopped doing that.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. For that we’ll go to Mr. Aumond.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just have a question about the fibre optic link contribution, the $7 million. Is that an interest cost or can we capitalize it?

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. For that we’ll go to Mr. Kalgutkar.

Just for my clarity, then, this is a payment we’re going to make to an entity that takes in all the partners in the fibre optic link.

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. For that we’ll go to Mr. Aumond.