Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just have a few general comments for this department. Obviously, I think almost everybody has spoken of the disastrous fire season and we talked about in the past and business plans and stuff like that about the base, and I guess it’s the cost of fire suppression is going to be the cost, I guess. Has there been any consideration in this budget to up that base of fire suppression? We know over a period of time there have been expenditures, and obviously last year was an exceptional year. Obviously, we wouldn’t want to set that as the benchmark, but is the department looking at increasing its base for fire suppression over the next little while? I think we talked about a three or a five or even a 10 year running average of what we did for fire suppression and going from that basis for future years to budgeting suppression so that we actually have a closer to an average amount, obviously, maybe excluding some of the exceptional years like last year. I would like to hear what the department has to say about our base for fire suppression.

I’d like to know what this department’s involvement has been with the fracking regulations and where we are going forward with regulations on fracking. Obviously, I would think this department would be highly involved as far as a baseline study to finding out what areas where we may potentially be doing fracking. Let’s say in the Sahtu area, getting involved in the baseline study. We need to have that baseline to know, going forward, what the effects of any activity would be. We know that some of the oils and stuff like that in the Sahtu are naturally occurring right now, so obviously we’d want to know what the base is before industry gets in there too far and gets too involved, obviously, for comparison.

Like my colleague, obviously, the energy that was there before, I’m not sure if everything has been transferred over to Public Works and Services for energy. Obviously, the funding of the Arctic Energy Alliance has been very effective. I think since we’ve gone to the Energy Charrette, one of the big questions there and discussions was about efficiencies and people taking action to make their homes and their appliances more efficient and trying to alleviate cost of living that way. I’m not sure if everything is transferred over there, going from some history notes that we had at business plans, but some of them may be dated now that we’ve transferred some of that to Public Works and Services. Again, if there’s any of that stuff still in ENR.

Obviously another project of interest is biomass, where we are going forward with biomass. The forest industry, from my understanding, we finally actually have maybe an opportunity to actually have a forestry industry that will require a forest management team there in place. That opportunity

is obviously very exciting for the South Slave. I’m looking forward to maybe seeing what the department is doing to linking that opportunity with some of, maybe, the fire suppression as far as smart communities. I know the department is going around to communities right now and talking about how to make your communities fire smart, and maybe there’s an opportunity to do some of that forestation in communities and maybe tie it in with our biomass potential project.

I know we are close to signing some of the transboundary water agreements and if the department could just give me a little bit of an update where we stand. I think we’ve just about dotted all the i’s and crossed the t’s with Alberta. I’m not sure where we’re at with BC and Saskatchewan, so if I could get a little bit of that information, it would be very interesting.

I guess we’re dealing with operations, but the whole budget has capital included in it, and I guess I am concerned that we didn’t evaluate that much more the 802 versus 215 units and even the option of privatizing some of the fire suppression. I’m still getting reports in of some of the assessment of the 802s, concerns with them, incident reports, capabilities for fire suppression in heavy, dense areas. I know we’ve used some of them lately, but I still continue to get some reports from other jurisdictions that they’re finding them to be ineffective in some areas, so obviously a concern in an area of the Northwest Territories especially after the fire suppression system that we just had. I think those are most of my comments.