Thank you, Mr. Chair. With me is the deputy minister, Ernie

Campbell; and Mr. Bill Mawdsley, director of forest fire operations. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Mr. Campbell, Mr. Mawdsley, welcome to the House again.

Committee, we were continuing on detail of Environment and Natural Resources. We are currently on page 22. With that, Environment and Natural Resources, forest management, infrastructure… Mrs. Groenewegen.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a motion I would like to have circulated, please.

Thank you. If you just give us a second, we’ll circulate that motion. Thank you.

Mrs. Groenewegen, go ahead with your motion.

Mr. Chair, I move that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources retain and continue to operate the existing fleet of government-owned Canadair CL-215 amphibious firefighting aircraft; and further, that the department of Environment and Natural Resources work closely with Municipal and Community Affairs’ School of Community Government to expand effort in training and developing community firefighters in all regions to promote awareness of fire protection responsibility at the community level. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The motion is in order. To the motion. Mrs. Groenewegen.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As I stated yesterday in the House, I am not opposed to the purchase of the new 802 firefighting aircraft, the ordering of those. They will be on the ground, I assume, around 2017. But I think that in spite of some of the challenges with the 215s, I think it is still worth hanging on to them. Mr. Miltenberger yesterday said that the overall cost of the firefighting season this past summer was $60 million and that it would cost around $3 million to keep this group of aircraft on the ground and on standby. It seems like it should be fairly good insurance if we end up having other serious fire seasons here in the Northwest Territories.

I think the CL-215s have proven themselves, and in spite of what I hear are some fuel issues, I think the GNWT owns an inordinate amount of parts for these aircraft, and from the information I have, it would appear that the market for these aircraft, if

the government were selling them, would hardly be enough to be considered the down payment on the 802s. I don’t know; I’m just looking at them from a business point of view, and if the 215s have any useful life to us, any use to us as a government, we would be better off to keep them in our possession as opposed to disposing of them.

As I had also mentioned, there may be future use for the 215s in the area of pollution and containment and abatement, and apparently there are kits that these aircraft could be outfitted with that could help us in that as well. So, I just don’t want the government to hastily dispose of these.

The capabilities of the 802s versus the CL-215s, and for sure I am not an expert on this, but to my understanding they are two very different vehicles when it comes to fighting fire and they each have their strengths and their weaknesses. I would question, I guess, the business sense of getting rid of the 215s because, like I said, it could be a very questionable value that we could actually acquire for them.

The second part of the motion speaks to the training of firefighting crews in the Northwest Territories. All fires are in different locations. Some of them are small and can be fought to some extent on the ground. I think that we need to make sure that we have attacks from all aspects and all angles available at our disposal. This also does create employment and training in our communities, and we have people then readily available who can assist when fires threaten their region and our communities. They can be deployed to different parts of the Northwest Territories. I think it’s another excellent investment on the part of this government.

That is it, kind of a summary. The gist of this motion is to retain the 215s. I am not opposed to purchasing the 802s and would like to see the human resource aspect of the firefighting component also ramped up by this government. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. To the motion. Mr. Bouchard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Obviously, with this year’s firefighting season, I am definitely supporting the second part of this training of firefighters at the regional levels and including more and more of that for future years. We know over the next couple of years we are probably going to need more crews on the ground, and even the department mentioned it yesterday that we have these large craft that spread retardant but the actual fires are put out by the crews, by the staff, and I think that we need to make sure that we have a well-trained staff in the Northwest Territories. If we have an abundance of staff in five years, then that’s something that we can farm out.

Obviously, considering the 215s, I do think it’s an asset that we need to keep. I have been questioning the need for the 802s at this time, especially with the expenditures that we’ve been having. I know there are concerns with the fuels, yet we know there are thousands if not tens of thousands of planes that are currently operating under this fuel system in North America, and I think that the perceived perception that there is going to be a shortage of this fuel is one where we are predicting, or one we are convincing ourselves that this is a situation that needs to be rectified by purchasing these 802s, spending $27 million currently. I guess I lost that fight. I have been fighting to maybe delay this purchase of these units and try to actually do it between the two types of equipment. I think this is the compromise that would keep the 215s.

When we have demands in the Territories, we’re going to need all the assets that we have. We have heard from the Minister and the department that we will farm it out, we will get additional reinforcements from other regions. The problem being, if there are fires in every other province and they have their assets contained, we will have difficulties acquiring this. Typically, there is some region that is not fighting fires at the same time as us, but the scenarios are that we should be keeping… If we have an asset that the fuel supply hasn’t run out, and we have these assets and the parts for it, we know that they are effective in many ways, we should be keeping these assets in our inventory until the last possible minute that we can.

We’re not getting much for sale value. We know they are not much use for other territories who have upgraded to the 415s, the larger planes. What we know is our jurisdiction is smaller funded and we can’t afford 415s, so I think we should be keeping the 215s as arsenal in our firefighting capacity, so I will be supporting this motion. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. To the motion. Mr. Moses.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just in light of the events that took place last year in the communities that were put at risk and not only that but having enough resources in terms of manpower, I think that the motion brought forth that we have before us is a motion that shows government supports our forestry division.

I honestly think that keeping the 215s, we need as many resources as possible along with the 802s, and I think they would be more efficient in terms of having initial attacks with the fires. Having more fleets would also be a safety mechanism, so we wouldn’t put some of our individuals on the front lines and we can fight them from the air rather than on the ground.

Speaking with some of my former colleagues in the forestry area, it was a very dry season and it’s all indicating that we will have another dry season next year, so we can actually look at having a more extreme fire season and it could possibly get worse. So the more resources we have, the better. Like was mentioned, we had seven communities that were at risk. Having those trained individuals would help lower that risk for communities that might be in danger.

But as my colleague Mr. Bouchard said, as well, we have jurisdictions that have extreme forest fire seasons, as well – BC, Alberta – and I know that the territory does export a lot of our firefighters south or to the Yukon or wherever there are extreme fire conditions.

So I support the motion and any resources that we can give to our guys on the front lines that would make sure that they go home at night and also protect our communities and our assets and peoples’ livelihoods. I fully support it and thank Mrs. Groenewegen for bringing this motion forward. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Moses. To the motion. Mr. Hawkins.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I could go on at length on how important our fire system is, and certainly our resources and personnel. I would certainly like to do so, but unfortunately, time doesn’t avail itself to the amount of things that we should be talking how great they are. I will say that without them, we would have seen such a horrendous result of this summer, and I am very thankful they have been on the line providing the services that they do.

The government does provide the resources necessary to do this job, and it’s our job to support the government where necessary and we feel it makes sense. This is an interesting one because our government is looking at the aircraft referred to as the 802s style of aircraft and replacing our present fleet, which is referred to as the 215. It’s funny when you think about it, that the new system will come in but does the old system become completely obsolete. There may be a value to it if we market it and sell it somewhere. But I often wonder what the results, thinking about that, is what value does it present us and what value have we taken away from the potential opportunity of using these?

I don’t know, really, if this is from an accounting exercise, certainly not experience. None of us in this room, besides the experts at the witness table that is, have this level of detail or experience on how to deal with these things, both financially and operationally.

One of the challenges I have here is the worry of thinking, would we be selling an asset of ours for

pennies on the dollar, out the door just to get rid of them and asking ourselves, are we ready for the next fire season or the next fire season thereafter. So I would caution us to get rid of them too. I think really what this motion is doing is suggesting, let’s keep them in our fleet, although it doesn’t have a time frame by saying keeping them in our fleet three, five, 10 years, but what it does is it suggests that we keep them in our fleet to be prepared.

I’m happy to support the motion at this time, and I would prefer that we keep them in our fleet, keep them accessible to us. And you know what? There may be a way to work them into our firefighting system.

I’d really like to see an evaluation done maybe after two fire seasons. If they become a financial problem, and I don’t want to use the word boondoggle, because that always brings a bit of a negative aspect, but if they end up being just a financial resource, we spend our money, that just isn’t played out, and the affordability factor, I mean, those results would drive the analysis, and I wouldn’t want to prejudice them coming in until that result is done. My encouragement would be, let’s keep them as an operational asset for probably a couple years and do an assessment on that and find out where they were.

It’s funny. We only have so many planes now and we fought the fires that we fought. What would it have been like if we had twice the amount of infrastructure fighting the same fire? Would we have fought it twice as fast? I don’t know. I mean, mathematically, fire doesn’t burn that way, I know. Fire experts will tell you how it burns, and how it continues to grow at different paces. Could we have stopped it sooner than later? I don’t know, but I would hope that maybe if we kept these a couple years, saw the results and were able to sort of chart and plan and predict, maybe, in the future, I mean, this might be the way to go.

The last thing I’ll say is, although we don’t have the money to go beyond eight 802s, after this fire season one may wonder is eight enough. Financially, we are not in any position to keep pursuing more than eight, but by the same token, keeping them, an asset we already own, a cache of equipment, stores of supplies and tools and everything that suits them, including parts, it would be a shameful waste to get rid of them, like I said, at pennies on the dollar when this could be a territorial resource that we could evaluate after a couple of years to find out if it really made sense.

We have to have the vision of this and this is what Legislatures do, is we’re supposed to have the vision of seeing problems ahead of us and trying to figure out ways to deal with them. I’m hopeful that this could be a resource that puts people to work and protects Northerners where it matters most.

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. To the motion. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will not be supporting this motion. I think retaining this fleet would be, unfortunately, equivalent to deciding to keep an albatross around our necks. This is currently an investment liability with increasingly low returns on that investment.

We know what maintenance costs are and they’re increasing. We know we have to maintain a huge parts inventory, and these are the sorts of commitments we’d need to retain this as a potentially useful tool. I mean, this is just for standby we’re talking here and the years such as this when we would take any help we can get. Of course, the Minister and others have mentioned that we can patch into those other resources nationally as required and very efficient use of fleets across Canada. It enables jurisdictions to do what they can without having to try and cover all fronts.

As a member of the Economic Development and Infrastructure standing committee, I was able to participate in a review of this and ask a lot of questions, and I was satisfied with the responses I heard. The sorts of things I’ve heard during the debate so far here with ENR and this session is these aircraft are costly to maintain. They’re old. As the Minister said, they’re almost as old as I am, and that’s pretty old. Those costs are both direct through maintaining the aircraft and indirect through maintenance of a very large inventory of parts which is required, as we know. I think of Buffalo Air and I’m sure they have a huge inventory of parts to keep those aircraft in the air, and that is an ongoing cost.

While they carry a larger payload of water, and that’s attractive, they are significantly limited, as we’ve heard, in several ways. Just to go over a few of those: maneuverability. They’re not able to get into small water bodies, so they have to go quite a ways. They’re not as precise in delivering the load exactly where it’s needed. Fuel requirements, very restrictive. Avgas, as we know, is becoming more and more limited in its availability across the NWT and across the North. Of course, that means they can’t be stationed where they need to be without a huge investment to transport fuel rather than relying on commercial supplies that have larger volumes and lower costs. There is also something I haven’t heard people mention very much, if at all, and that’s the personnel requirements. The 215s have double the personnel requirements of the 802s, and to have them on standby, again, I think, is a significant part of the costs. I’ve mentioned the maintenance and precision of delivery as an additional couple of things.

I’d just like to relate, very briefly, an experience I had. I think it was last summer. My wife and I were

out at River Lake and woke up to a small forest fire not too far away. After foolishly trying to fight it ourselves, we found out my wife’s cell phone worked, so we were able to patch in and within 20 minutes the 215s were there. It was great. There were two of them and they dumped six loads for that tiny little fire, but each time to reload they had to go all the way to Prosperous Lake, whereas the 802s clearly would have been able to dip right there into that significantly sized River Lake. That’s an example of the sorts of and, again, very precise, delivery.

Pollution kits, I think I heard Mrs. Groenewegen talk about those, and those are of interest. I would think they would certainly be available on a modern aircraft and we should include that in our purchase if that’s the case for the 802s.

Currently, I think there is a modest bit of resale value for these aircraft and the very large parts inventory we have, so considering this potential investment recovery, as modest as it is, but also avoiding the increasing annual costs of maintenance, crews, insurance, and so on, all for this aging fleet, with all of the limitations that are listed in their performance really robs us of the funding and resources we’re seeking in the second half of the motion, which I do support very much. Partly I disagree with the first part of this and I see a conflict with the second part, which I do support.

Again, I appreciate this being brought forward and the discussion that it’s engendered here, and I certainly hope we don’t forget about the second part. Again, I will be not supporting the motion, but I do appreciate the discussion.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. To the motion. I have Mr. Menicoche.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Having discussions with our committee with the Minister of ENR with regard to purchase of the Air Tractor 802s, I certainly support the idea of replacing the CL-215s, and one of the biggest is, aside from all the technical aspects that are being discussed here in the last little bit, is we’re facing funding pressures, and once again, if we’re going to maintain the extra fleet while buying these new Air Tractors, we’re also talking about $3 million worth of resources that is much needed in the communities and regions. I liked the briefing where it says that because they’re smaller, they’re able to be closer to the fires. They’re even able to be parked in some of the smaller communities with the longer runways if and when needed.

I won’t be supporting that motion, but I just want to say further to that, it’s interesting how the motion talks about efforts in training and deploying community firefighters in all regions, and that’s certainly something that’s definitely needed and I certainly support that. I know that our communities want those extra supports out there because they

told me this summer, why wait for the firefighters? Why don’t you use that extra training and hire more people from the communities that want to be out there firefighting? So if anything needs to be said about this motion, I would say we’ve got to continue utilizing our homegrown expertise. There are lots of people in my communities that want to go firefighting. They’re EFFs, but we were importing a lot of firefighters this summer. I certainly support additional firefighters for the communities, but the way the motion reads, maintaining an older fleet that needs increased maintenance and even more maintenance, I just can’t support that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. To the motion I have Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the mover of the motion bringing it forward. I’ve listened to the arguments on both sides and I really don’t know whom to believe at this point. I see the value in retaining the CL-215s, but I also understand the cost that’s involved if we do that. I do appreciate that I think the argument that the eight new 802s will suffice, that we don’t need to keep the CL-215s. So I’m torn and think that I don’t want to vote against this motion.

I certainly appreciate the second part of this motion. I do believe that we need to make sure that our communities have firefighters within the communities, that we retain firefighters within our communities, and I gather there’s been a trend away from that.

So I will have to abstain from the motion. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. To the motion, Mr. Yakeleya.

Mr. Chair, I wanted to say that the fleet that we own, the CL-215s, were, I’d say, a gift from the federal government when we purchased them. They certainly have done their work fighting fires in the Northwest Territories. Certainly, we could continue to use them. We’ve seen a number of dollars that were spent on this past summer’s fire season and I think that there’s still some useful time left in the life of these CL-215s. I’m hoping that the government would continue to look for ways that we can retain them and continue to operate them in the North.

There has to be a lot of pros on the CL-215s. That’s why it makes good sense for us to keep these fleets within the control of the GNWT.

The second paragraph of this motion speaks to the community members who want to help their community by fighting fires, if they’re properly trained. We made a conscious decision to cut crews in some of the smaller communities to save money, and I know that didn’t make sense to some of the communities that no longer have suppression crews in their communities while there were fires

around the communities and the water bombers came in to fight the fires. There has to be a balance.

Community fire suppression crews do a lot for the communities and sometimes other resources are not available right away, and sometimes these fires are being monitored far from the community. They get bigger and bigger and pretty soon everybody is screaming and yelling for water bombers, it’s smoky and all that stuff. My friend next to me, fortunately they had cell phone service and made a phone call, and he said 20 minutes later two water bombers were coming in. They dropped six loads. I sure wish I had that in the Sahtu, you know. So we’ll be fighting every fire down here in the south and here. Last year it wasn’t like that in the Sahtu, and it was pretty smoky up there.

So this is where we see the second phase of the motion, to bring and train and start deploying the firefighters in the communities and the regions. You have to have fire suppression crews. You have to bring a balance to the technology and just good old plain manpower and look at some of the areas and how we’re fighting fires in the different regions. That’s why I said yesterday in Committee of the Whole, there seems to be some kind of a two-tier standard for fighting fire in the Northwest Territories. The department officials could tell me otherwise, but I’ve seen it in the Sahtu. I know there are some people in the communities who have fought fires for a long time. Sometimes they don’t meet the up-to-date standards of being a firefighter. It’s changed over time.

I fought fire when I was a young man – I’m still a young man – in the good old days of fighting fire. Today, I understand, they’ve got showers now. You never heard about that in ’79. They had showers in camps and you’re moving out there in the hot fires with backpacks and we gave ‘er until the fire was out. We were happy when the water bombers came because then we got a five-minute rest. Then we worked again. I think some of the old way of doing business is still valid today. I think that we’ve got to believe in our people, and this motion’s second paragraph is talking about the people don’t have that dependence so much on new aircraft coming in.

We’ve got to believe in our people and say that it makes sense to have a fire crew in the regions or in the communities that the crews were cut from, not having a suppression crew there. It’s an evolution process in developing our people in our smaller communities. And there are challenges. Nothing is going to be easy. I think that this motion is talking about that, bringing back the basics. This technology out there, the 802s, I think that they’re pretty good, from what I’m hearing. They can do some good work there. I think we need to balance it with some pretty good crews. You could call them

the 802 crews in the communities, a new breed of firefighters. Like I said, I never thought I’d see showers in the fire camps, but they are there. I remember how people felt when they were working on the fires and helping their community.

So I’m going to support this motion on that principle, and I think that there are some… Surely there must be some good points in the CL-215s and we can use them. I think there’s a need for it. All I’ve been hearing is the reasons why we need to let them go. I guess maybe for some of us it’s hard to let some things go. It may be true, I’m not doubting the information, but I think there’s a way that we could certainly keep them and see where they can be most beneficial to us. Those are my comments, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. To the motion. Mr. Blake.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. As much as I would like to support this motion, from what I understand there are a few challenges with the current aircraft, keeping them operating and up to standards. As you know, in this day and age there are a lot of standards that we have to follow and I think that moving forward with new aircraft will live up to those standards and have safer equipment for forestry crews.

Also, the second part of the motion, working with the School of Community Government, in the past ENR has always had suppression crews on their own. We do have fire departments in our communities, but they focus on our actual community and suppression crews tend to defend the communities and around the community.

Moving forward, I think that is something that we need to bring back. I mentioned that, even within the last year here, even before this big fire season that we had. We didn’t seem to act on that and we see the consequences; you know, scrambling around, last minute. It seems that we are always doing crisis control.

It always helps to be prepared for major disasters like this. We were very fortunate this year that we did manage to control the fire, but now, moving forward, we have to do a better job as government to be prepared. I really strongly recommend that we put back those suppression crews that we have taken out within the last 10 years. I could name a few communities offhand, but I’m sure the department knows that very well. Moving forward, I would like to see those put back in place.

To the motion, unfortunately, I can’t support that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Blake. To the motion. Minister Miltenberger.