Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I do not know whether our 100 percent publically owned Power Corporation should be competing for the Hay River power delivery franchise, but I guarantee Cabinet doesn’t know either. Big questions, incredibly and worryingly, remain undebated and unresolved. Despite oodles of opportunity, Cabinet has failed to lead a meaningful discussion towards a renewed energy policy that will reduce energy costs, provide direction when questions such as the Hay River RFP arise, enable other companies to provide power, such as Fort Liard Geothermal, and begin to mitigate climate change.

In the absence of thoroughly debated and carefully crafted policy, incorporating today’s technologies and potential for distributed energy, we actively kill sustainable opportunities, adopt an unaffordable and unsuccessful policy of massive subsidies and now propose to direct a Crown corporation that has failed to ever reduce costs, to compete for yet more monopolized responsibility for power delivery, all with zero consultation with MLAs or even with the current Hay River provider which has 60-plus years of doing the work.

I take great caution in supporting a large corporation in the delivery of power services. However, I am much more comfortable when the corporation is highly regulated by an arm’s-length public body such as the Public Utilities Board which is mandated to protect the public interest. The PUB has demonstrably saved both taxpayers and ratepayers millions of dollars through their rigorous review and oversight.

The board regulates to compensate utilities for 95 to 105 percent of their cost of service, including a profit in the order of 8 to 9 percent. A 2008 PUB

study of NTPC cost of service found that NTPC was being compensated 130 percent of costs for South Slave communities. Not only was this not corrected, government ignored this fact, increased their own legislative power over the supposedly arm’s-length PUB and crippled the PUB’s ability to do their job with government fiat issued this April. The directive limits the PUB to issuing rate adjustments of only 1 percent or less, with the result that NTPC’s 30 percent overcharge if still true today, will remain in place with only very minor adjustments perhaps for decades. So much for reducing cost of living.

As government flip-flops and makes murky policy behind closed doors, people pay ever-higher energy costs. Instead of a thoroughly debated energy policy that guides decisions and benefits people, the economy and the environment, Cabinet decisions are made in a policy vacuum and we let this happen.

I will have questions. Mahsi.