The Minister’s quite correct in terms of predictions of the future. Maybe down in this area here the water is low, but I know that up in our area the water is quite high. You know there’s lots of water in the mountains for the fall hunt, lots of water the people say when they go up to the Keele River to do their fall hunt. There’s lots of water up there. So we have to be very specific, not to generalize too much to scare off people here.
Now, the Minister has talked about a very interesting point on the future energy of the Northwest Territories. I sit in a region where there’s lots of natural gas and we have a potential for some hydro initiatives. Our studies show that we’re not in a good place for any type of wind energy, plus we could do some more work in the solar energy, but we’ve got a lot of fuels in the woods, in woodstoves and burning wood. I haven’t seen any type of creative thought to having wood as a source of energy for people in our small communities, not even to look at the possibility of tapping into Norman Wells natural gas to fuel our communities or even to go forward with the Hay River run-of-the-mill hydro. We see lots of initiatives south of Wrigley in spending dollars but we don’t look at the smaller communities, except we’re looking at Colville Lake. Actually, the world’s looking at Colville Lake at the solar panel and the diesel. Other than that, nothing in Good Hope except Good Hope has made some strong initiatives to bring woodstoves in and put them in the housing, or Tulita or Deline.
I think we’re a little frightened to look at the natural gas in Norman Wells. There could be a business case with ITI to look at how we cap in with the natural gas in Norman Wells to link up to our communities. It’s clean energy, it’s cheap and it could bring down the energy use and also there’s an abundance of that. Oil under the ground, the National Energy Board has estimated over 200 billion barrels of oil. Let’s not be afraid of these types of potential in our region.
I wanted to state to the Minister that we have these projects going around the communities but I have not seen much other than to have the solar panels. I’ve seen them. I drove up to Colville Lake and I saw them. They looked quite impressive. Test that out to see if it’s working well and the cost of their energy is going to go down, but other than that I haven’t heard anything from this government as to how they’re going to work with the community of Deline on their run-of-the-mill hydro plant. Nothing concrete, it’s sitting there and there are no dollars going towards that initiative to get it going. Look at the possibilities of a hydro transmission line from Deline to small communities. You can have pretty well one cent a kilowatt if you have that operation going over a long period of time.
So, Madam Chair, our region is sitting on billions and billions of barrels of oil. We’ve got to do something with that, even having a case built with this government to see if we can tap into the natural gas. Things like that. One of the ones that I think could fly, and I’ve heard it before, was to use wood as a source of energy in our communities with woodstoves, and that can benefit a lot of people, benefit our communities. So we’ve got to do something in that area. So, I wanted to remind the Minister, when you look at the additional dollars, to look at the communities that can benefit quite a lot and let’s use what we have.