Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Over the Christmas season I was helping a constituent with their Energy Efficiency Incentive Program and they were filling out the paperwork and asked me for some advice. I started to look at the Energy Efficiency Incentive Program that was created years ago and, of course, some great work had been done. Included are things such as rebates on washers, refrigerators, freezer chests, wood stoves, lightbulbs, and the list goes on. But what I happened to quickly notice was there was a glaring gap between the fact that there wasn’t any efficiency program design around insulation, windows and doors. I even wonder why alternative energy isn’t being considered at this particular time.
Most people will tell you, who are familiar with this industry, that the largest part of energy going into
your house is, of course, heating it. Now, we could be talking about power bills here today, but let’s focus in on the efficiency of how you run your house.
If your house isn’t protected from the elements, and that’s certainly the exchange between hot and cold and we certainly live in an area that gets a lot of cold, you have energy seeped out of the windows, through the roof, through the walls, underneath the door. We spend a lot of time worrying about trying to make wood stoves efficient or our furnaces efficient, but why aren’t we making the walls and the roof and the windows and the doors as efficient as possible?
I guess I’m saying this: It has finally come to the realization that instead of worrying about saving pennies – which are very important, by the way – on getting better faucets and toilets, we should be looking at the fact that we could help Northerners save dollars and hundreds of dollars by better insulating their homes.
Many homes will cost thousands of dollars to increase the insulation on their house to improve the envelope to ensure that they’re using their energy more efficiently and wisely. I think it’s time that this government starts to realize that we could be helping Northerners through insulation programs, window programs, door programs and certainly alternative energy programs such as solar.
Just to wrap this up, we do have people in the Northwest Territories that make a big commitment. I was in Hay River not that long ago and I was speaking to somebody who makes windows, and I was speaking to someone here in Yellowknife who does doors, and they do local products in Yellowknife even such as insulation. We have northern people coming forward with northern solutions in our northern climate that can help every Northerner across our territory. Let’s now take a review of this particular program and add the biggest bang for our buck. Help Northerners save where it matters most.