Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman. As has been said, the big issue on the capital acquisition for the Department of ENR is these 802s. It’s difficult to talk about them in great detail because, of course, it’s a very technical topic and one that’s very specialized. I’m sure the department has done a fair amount of research into the 802s and the suitability of them for the type of work that we seemingly need to do every year here in the Northwest Territories in fighting fires. I don’t dispute that it is time to add to what we have available here to fight fires. We hope we don’t get future years like we had this past year, but it’s not something that’s out of the realm of possibility.
I think that the Standing Committee on Economic Development and Infrastructure has spent a great deal of time talking with the department about all the pros and cons and has covered this topic very thoroughly and, as Mr. Bouchard indicated earlier, there’s been a lot of testing and a lot of trial that’s already been done with these aircraft. So, I don’t think that I have an issue with the acquisition. I’m supporting the acquisition of these aircraft with the model that is proposed by the department of the GNWT to own them and to contract for the operations and maintenance of them.
However, I do have some concerns about the department’s eventual plans to dispose of the 215s and I think that the 215s and the 802s have very, very different capacities and different roles that they could play depending on the location of the fire, the size of the fire and I know it all comes down to a matter of money. I don’t think that the 215s are probably necessarily, on any given day, worth a lot of money on the open market and I don’t know why we wouldn’t want to, if we could, and if we could afford it, have the option of using the 215s where it’s appropriate, even if they were on standby and the 802s were the main aircraft we would use to fight fire. But I’m sure the Minister will have some good reasoning for that and I guess that I’d like to hear what that is. Thank you.