Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As we look to build more homes in the North, and the GNWT's Best Building Practices become more complex, we will become more beholden to the building sciences. It's not news that the way we build in the NWT requires more effort, more time, and significantly more consideration, not to mention cost, Mr. Speaker. However, if we decide to skip any steps, the cost is borne by our residents for decades. Put simply, if we build buildings not designed for our climate, it costs us more in the long run. Our infrastructure is aging, and we need people to rebuild it.
Beyond the labour needed to construct new facilities and homes, we also need people to design them. Many of our buildings in the NWT are just not holding up to our northern climate anymore. They're leaky and expensive to maintain. This is a well-known problem, and the $60 million utility bill this government gets every year doesn't let us forget, not to mention that the $600 million deferred maintenance deficit lets us never forget the importance of good infrastructure the first time.
If we are going to build new infrastructure with a life span of at least 40 years, northern people should be designing it who know our climate. There is no question that jobs in the building sciences will exist in five or 20 years. It is an industry that is seeing growth as more people understand the value in green building technologies. We have included skill trades and technology in one of our areas of specialization for the northern polytech university, and to date, the words I have seen are saying the right things. We are still a long way away from actually increasing enrolment and graduating people ready to design the next generation of northern buildings.
Mr. Speaker, I am not asking for a full-fledged engineering or architectural program. A two-year technical program is probably more our capability, but it needs to be exciting enough to attract people from across Canada and the world. The North has a very specific climate, which is ideal for learning how to test the extremes of building science. There is increased interest in this area every day across the circumpolar world. Green building programs are slowly cropping up all around Canada. Northern building technique courses are appearing in universities across the world, but I want to make sure that we capture this momentum and lead the trend. I will have questions for the Minister of ECE about whether we can see the development of a building science program as key to the new polytechnic. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.