Thank you. My question is about the evaluation making sense where you have an office that already has six people in it, and I appreciate the Minister keeping those positions in the Hay River area, but like I said, the government has indicated that they’re trying to keep synergies together and they’re basically creating a bigger office, even bigger than they currently have into a new area where we currently don’t have a lot of activity, and we have a lot of activity in the Sahtu and we have an office in the Hay River area. So I guess my concept is that the thing would have been to expand the Hay River office and expand into the Sahtu where the activity is currently.

Thank you. As a government and as we move forward with decisions regarding where the positions would be, there’s a tremendous amount of pressure on the government, on the department on where those positions would end up being. Again, it’s important that we protect what we have. These are new positions that we’ve taken on in the transfer of responsibilities from the federal government. It was a chance for us to put nine new positions into a

community like Inuvik and at the same time protect the six positions that we had in Hay River. We are very much watching the activity level in the Sahtu, we have put positions in the Sahtu and we will continue to gauge the activity level in the Sahtu and adjust things accordingly. Thank you.

I guess I’m having difficulty with the Minister’s answers to these questions. It makes sense to expand offices that you currently have, it makes sense to be in the areas where the offices are and I know, from the rest of the departments and the other expenses to devolution, that the Beaufort-Delta experienced a lot of positions. So I guess I’m having a tough time swallowing what the Minister is giving us for an answer and what the government’s given us for an answer on the decentralization and equalization, it’s in a different region. So I’m wondering if the department has done an evaluation of what the costs are to have people in the Beaufort-Delta as opposed to other regions, and I’m assuming some of these nine people are going to have to travel down to the Sahtu versus coming up from the South Slave.

Thank you. If we did that type of evaluation, we wouldn’t have any government positions outside of a few centres in the southern part of the territory. So we can’t just go off of this straight-up cost. I mean, it’s a cost to government, it’s a cost to accomplish what we need to accomplish.

Again, this was a transfer of responsibilities. We believe wholeheartedly that the activity in the Beaufort-Delta is going to be there. That’s the location of the three anchor fields for the Mackenzie Gas Project, it’s a home base for the offshore and the potential in the offshore. There’s $2 billion in work commitments in the offshore. We’re not responsible for the offshore yet, but hopefully, at some point in time, this government will be responsible for the offshore, and it’s important that we have a presence in the Beaufort-Delta and by putting that office in the Beaufort-Delta we certainly have a presence in the Beaufort-Delta. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate the Minister’s comments and I appreciate the Beaufort-Delta, I have lots of friends in the area, it will probably make it less now that I’m bringing this up. But the potential of the Beaufort-Delta, and the Minister said it himself, we don’t have the responsibility for offshore right now. So I don’t even know how we justify putting those nine positions into the Beaufort-Delta when we know that the activity currently, right now, is in the Norman Wells and in the Sahtu area. We have specialists in the Hay River office that are working on some of that as well. So those are the two offices where I think those nine positions should have been put into. I don’t understand the justification.

I appreciate the Member’s concern and I understand where he’s coming from. But again, from an operational perspective, it was important for our government to have a presence in the Mackenzie Delta, in the Beaufort-Delta, and putting these nine positions in the community of Inuvik made sense for us for the future.

Again, we are going to be negotiating a deal on the offshore. We have $2 billion in work commitments out there. We have a tremendous amount of potential, a resource that could rival the Gulf of Mexico in terms of oil and gas opportunities. Also, as I mentioned earlier, it’s home to the three anchor fields for the Mackenzie Gas Project, as well, and there’s tremendous opportunity in the Mackenzie Delta for further gas and oil exploration. Thank you.

I guess my difficulty with the whole process is that we could move some of those positions once we have that potential, not a potential anymore, but actual activity in the area. There is actual activity happening in the Sahtu right now and the Minister and the department decided that there are no positions going into the Sahtu currently, which I think is a grave mistake and I don’t understand how, operationally, it says it makes sense to be there as opposed to having positions in the Sahtu and expand your current operations in Hay River.

Thank you. I suppose it could have been somewhat worse for the Member. This is a headquarters function; the office could have been located in Yellowknife. We decided to move it outside of Yellowknife and Inuvik was the location that we decided to put the office. So it is outside of Yellowknife, it is in Inuvik, and again, it’s a transfer of responsibilities. This office will be responsible for the new statutory authorities that this government has under devolution and we’re looking forward to that office being successful, and again, in its backyard, in the Beaufort-Delta, there are tremendous opportunities. Thank you.

Thank you. I don’t really appreciate the tone in the fact that I should be appreciative of the positions that I have. The remark is that, well, if I don’t like it, well, the positions could be somewhere else and in Yellowknife. I think there’s a bit of an undertone there and I don’t appreciate that context. The concept is where the activity is happening is where the positions should be. I don’t think the department has justified why those positions are happening in the Beaufort-Delta, especially nine positions. We’re over doubling the amount of positions we currently have. I guess population doesn’t make much sense to me. So, thank you.

Thank you. I meant nothing by my comments. I was just trying to make a point that these are headquarters positions that we have decided to move outside of the capital to

Inuvik. That’s a decision the department made and the government has made and one that we stand by. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Ramsay. Next I have Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m not quite sure where to start here. Just on the petroleum resources office, I’m perplexed why we have two divisions here. You end up having a lot more costs because you’ve got to have directors and all this sort of stuff. These are obviously petroleum offices and I don’t have a problem with them being in two locations, but I just think there are some efficiencies that could be had there.

Maybe while I’m at it, I see petroleum resources also oversees the management of the Environmental Studies Research Fund. This is the fox in the henhouse, obviously. ENR should clearly be in charge of those. Maybe I could get the reasoning for that.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Mr. Vician.

Thanks for that clarification. I understand that the Minister of ITI is the new regulator for oil and gas in the NWT, and I understand now that we are contracting out to NEB and the industry-led regulator from Alberta, which has the atrocious environmental record that we all hear about every day on the radio, and the coal dam breach and slurry going down the Athabasca River heading for the NWT, and what did we hear the other day, six million litres a day coming out of one reservoir perched on the edge of the Athabasca River, and all this, you know, people with cancer. This is the regulator that were contracting with, all of which has been done without one iota of input from committee.

I have a lot of questions. Who will have what authority? What responsibility? What will the role of the Members be in decision-making? How will you be reassuring the public that they will have input and how will you be providing them the opportunity for input and a transparent process? Basically this unit is not even in here, but we find out that the

dollars are. We’re buying a pig in a poke. This should not be in this budget. Talk about seamless and prepared. I don’t think so. How can you have half of it in here and half of it not with no input from Members? I’ll start with that.

That’s essentially baloney. We know, we read the papers, we listen to the radio, we watch the news on television, we watch the oil bubbling up because of this regulator’s failures in northern Alberta more and more and more daily without a resolution. We are not talking about a responsible… Around for years? This agency has undergone three name changes, I think, in the last three years. It’s an industry-led regulator. That is not what the people of the Northwest Territories are looking for, thank you very much. Let’s go on record here. Let’s use evidence-based decision-making for a change.

I had a number of questions. What will be the responsibility of each of these contractors’ contractees? How will the public input in our decision-making, which we know is finally behind closed doors? How is the public’s input going to be included and assured? How are Members going to be participating in decision-making?

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Mr. Bromley, I know you feel strongly and passionately about this. I think that you could tell the deputy minister that you don’t agree with him or you don’t have confidence in what he is stating, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to say that what he is saying is baloney, because that is tantamount, in my mind, to being somehow not true. It just seems a little unparliamentary, so I’ll just caution the Member on that and go to Mr. Ramsay, please.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’ll go to Deputy Minister Vician for some detail on Mr. Bromley’s questions, but I just wanted to assure Mr. Bromley and Members that at the soonest opportunity we’ll get to committee. We’ll have that discussion at committee so committee can ask the questions that they want to ask once this rolls out. It’s not our objective to be hiding anything. We want to get in front of committee as soon as possible.

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. Mr. Vician.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I accept your caution, and I offer any apologies that are needed. I know Mr. Vician is a man of integrity and proven record, and I feel like I can speak very frankly with him, and he is here speaking on behalf of the Minister, but if I stepped on any toes there, I apologize. I will try and come up with another word other than baloney.

Obviously, lots of things to discuss here. Another issue that I wanted to speak about was the geoscience office. Now, I know we’re proposing – I don’t think it’s obvious here, the way the budget is laid out, of course – another $650,000 on to this office. Now, I was down in the Great Hall here, a few metres behind the Minister not too long ago when they were announcing a big program, a $2 million-plus program joint between federal and territorial government. This office is a subsidy to the mineral industry. It’s a subsidy that is not uncommon across the country, but we are intending to approach things as if our 42,000 people can act like, you know, three million or whatever in Alberta, or whatever it is. I think we have to be pretty cautious here.

I’d like to ask the Minister how the heck we can afford this, after a recent lavish bump-up for this office and what exactly is that $650,000 for. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Mr. Vician.