Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to follow up a little bit on Ms. Bisaro’s comments. This is primarily motivated by low water which is causing the need for diesel power generation in lieu of not having any other green energy generation capability at this moment in time. I guess I’ll start by saying this is shameful to me, given that the same thing happened last year.
I spoke very clearly on this, both in the media and in the House and to the Minister, and yet, exactly the same thing happened again this year.
I am happy that committee is now committed to beginning work on this, albeit belatedly and modestly. But, again, just to follow up with Ms. Bisaro’s comments about the need to bring this into our fiscal planning and so on. Just with a couple of minutes of thinking, looking at the costs of climate change, and these are impacts that are consistent with climate change, extreme events that we have not seen before. Last year we had $60 million for fire suppression costs, through the roof. We had the Inuvik Airport, Hay River Airport, we had Highway No. 3, the Dempster. We had power generating costs of $20 million, or $15 million actually. Five million dollars went into this fiscal year and now we’re proposing another $22 million for this fiscal year, so that would $27 million.
Really, we’re talking now about hundreds of millions of dollars, and I know it’s affecting our fiscal planning. We can’t have those sorts of unplanned for costs without that. It’s exacerbated, of course, because of our low net fiscal benefit compared to our predictions during the devolution negotiations.
I’m wondering: has the Minister sat down to try and summarize and collect and do a financial accounting of impacts that are pretty directly related to climate change in the last few years.