Thanks for the update. The Bear has a lot of power, hydro power, and moving forward, when you look at a business case for the
people in Deline to look at putting in a hydro plant, they could look at a long-term vision how do we get that revenue, how do we make it pay itself. There’s Tulita, there’s Norman Wells that could possibly be hooked up, or Good Hope. You know, thinking out there, we have oil and gas activity across the river that may be able to use some of that energy. I think it’s no different than us putting money into a hydro grid down south of the lake here to other jurisdictions. I mean, let’s look at our own backyard and see what the Bear River hydro could produce not only for the community but for other communities and possibly for the oil and gas industry. That’s something for out-of-the-box thinking in terms of supporting the hydro initiative in the Great Bear River.
I want to leave that open for the Minister and say it’s not just isolating one community and saying, well, it’s a couple million doesn’t make any sense or whatever, but let’s go beyond that, just as we are thinking about going beyond the lake here. Going down and selling our power south of the lake here and you want to invest in several hundred million dollars. We have a good business case also in the Sahtu region using the Bear River hydro initiative. I want to just leave that with the Minister.
The other point I want to make on the energy is that now we’re using more of the wood pellets in the Northwest Territories and we’re promoting that through an energy initiative, which is a good thing. People like that and people are using that now. They’re starting to warm up to the wood pellet concept. I want to ask: Is the department thinking about, along with the Department of Justice, is there any type of upcoming type of legislation to regulate wood pellets? Because it goes with the markets, the prices are high, the prices are low. Right now there are no regulations on wood pellets. You buy it as the market demands. We need to have some type of regulations on purchasing bags of wood pellets. Even some of our stores now are carrying them. Like, Northern Store is starting to carry wood pellets. We’re going to start an industry here in the Northwest Territories, so we’ve got to keep ahead of this here and protect the consumers. We want to promote wood pellets and just have some regulations and have some good discussion.