Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Over the last three years with Inuvik’s troubles with their gas wells taking on water and the issue of using propane, between the Power Corp and the government, we’ve put in about $8 million
to make sure we’ve tried to cushion the blow of the loss of the gas. We’ve switched the Power Corp initially to diesel; we switched our buildings back to diesel to make sure we freed up much cheaper gas to the people of Inuvik. On top of that we have a lot of programs for conservation, energy efficiencies, appliances, insulation, windows, which reduce your energy requirements. But as the Premier indicated, we’re talking about it through the Energy Charrette and the focus on generation looking at spending tens upon tens of millions of dollars to assist communities to deal with generation issues. For example, in Inuvik we’ve been monitoring the wind at Storm Hills between Inuvik and Tuk, and we know that there’s a capacity there that we could put in eight or nine megawatt wind generators that would cut reliance on diesel in Inuvik and probably Tuk by half. That’s about a 30 to 40 million dollar price tag. Those are the kind of investments, rather than subsidies, that we think would be of much bigger benefit, would minimize our reliance on diesel, cut all those greenhouse gases and lower the cost to communities.
One of the challenges on the power side is that the residential rates are pegged to the Yellowknife rate. Unfortunately, the business rates are not. They pay the fully burdened cost. So that, as well, is an issue we have to look at as we look at rate structures across the Northwest Territories, especially when it comes to essential services like food. Thank you.