Finance Committee on April 7th, 2017

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Absolutely. I'll be meeting with them in the next couple of weeks, so I'll have a conversation and see if they're working on anything to address needs up north. That'll be interesting.

Moving on to housing. If I understood correctly, you mentioned you still need 3,000 housing units. Is that the right number?

[Peter Taptuna]

Absolutely. That's the number we were desperately short of, approximately 3,000 units.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

When we talk housing, can you just give me kind like a rundown of.... Are you looking at apartment style or individual homes? What are the challenges of building houses out there, cost-wise as well? What does that picture look like?

[Peter Taptuna]

Absolutely, the cheapest form of building public units is either multiplexes, five-plexes, 10-plexes, or even higher. Then of course land is always a high cost.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Who owns most of the land there? Is that the government or...?

[Peter Taptuna]

Yes, the municipality.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Who is actually building these multiplexes? Is it private interest? Is it the government? Is it non-profits?

[Peter Taptuna]

We let procurement through our housing corporation do that. Then of course, one of the highest costs is bringing up the construction material.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

I would imagine so. There's no forestry up there, is there?

[Peter Taptuna]

No. It's a budding industry.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Most of my other questions have been covered.

Hunter, if you have any more you'd like to ask, go ahead.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

I might apologize for some of the members who had to leave, Mr. Premier. There were a couple who had to go to House duty, and there's one who had to catch a plane. They said to pass on their regards to you as they were leaving.

Hunter, go ahead.

[Hunter Tootoo, Independent, Nunavut, NU]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thanks, Dan.

I'd like to go back to something you mentioned earlier on, looking at your request for $250 million over 10 years to help modernize and maintain capacity in some of the power generation plants that are in the territory. As you said, the majority of those plants were built before I was born. I don't know about you, Joe.

How important do you think being able to modernize is? When they were built back then, there was probably no energy efficiency, not clean. In this request, would that be looking at not only increasing capacity but also incorporating cleaner and more energy-efficient technology into those systems?

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

On that point, Mr. Premier, when we were doing pre-budget consultations, I think it was in Halifax where we heard proposals from—I forget the name of the company. Ron MacDonald was the guy who talked about proposals for the north. I believe it was trucking liquefied natural gas into units in the north. Anyway, it was an interesting proposal and it was at our Halifax hearing.

Are some of those options being looked at as well and also along the lines that Hunter is talking about?

[Peter Taptuna]

Absolutely, and thank you for that question.

When we talk about our inefficient power generating plants in Nunavut, these are very old. When you have engines burning only 30% to 50% of their fuel, and the rest going out to exhaust, that is a major problem. When we talk about putting in a cleaner, eco-friendly system, we're still a ways from that, but as you indicated, there are companies out there that are talking LNG and tidal energy.

Mr. Chairman, we have one area in Iqaluit where tidal energy can be looked at, but the conditions are very harsh. It's not like the Bay of Fundy. I understand that they are doing some testing on equipment in the Bay of Fundy, and they're having some difficulties in ideal conditions. Up north, we have ice and colder temperatures that make it very difficult to deal with equipment. If you talk to any mining company, you will see that their equipment costs go up over the winter just because of dealing with the cold temperatures that we face up north.

But again we want to make sure, every time we put in a new facility, a new plant, or renovate an old, inefficient plant, that we have an opportunity to put in some kind of system that's reliable and more eco-friendly. That's one of the things that we consistently talk about.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you.

Mr. Fergus, you have the last question.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's a pleasure to have you here. I represent a Quebec riding, and I remember the first time I had the opportunity to visit your capital. Two things struck me immediately, and the first was the lack of trees. It took me a while to figure that out, actually. It was something odd. But most importantly what struck me was how youthful the population was, how many young people were there, and that was so clear to see.

Before I became a politician, I worked in the university field and I know there are some universities that have set up programs to run some programs out of Iqaluit. I'm just wondering if you could tell us what you feel is the greatest challenge for the young people of Nunavut, and how it looks ahead for opportunities for them.

[Peter Taptuna]

Absolutely, we do have a young population. It's throughout our whole territory, in our bigger communities, our medium-sized communities, and in our small communities. One of the challenges that we face is, of course, the cost of providing services for them. Again, providing health care and education costs us about $500 million a year. But at the end of the day one basic thing that we need for our young population to grow is shelter.

When you live in a small, isolated community, it's very difficult for them to move forward. Although we see progress being made, with more and more younger people attending colleges and universities down south here—and that's one of the things we want to encourage—it's very difficult in the smaller communities when there's no economic activity or employment. It just drains the energy out of our communities. That's one thing we want to see, more opportunities for our young people.

Although it's at a high cost at this time to provide services for a young population, we know now going into the future that once they're educated that's our best potential for a healthy territory.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Further on that, are there plans afoot for more partnerships with educational institutions down south to open up satellite campuses in the territories? Perhaps, Minister, you might know this better.

[Peter Taptuna]

Absolutely. Again, we're talking about setting up a college or university in our territory. It will give more vision for our young people to look forward to, because at this point there's no university. We do have Nunavut Arctic College, which helps us out in big ways, but at the same time we want to ensure that we educate our younger people to become professionals. When I say that, we want to encourage all sorts of different types of education.

We do have young people in classrooms down here in Ottawa, and that's called Nunavut Sivuniksavut, and it's a great program. It brings out a lot of good attitudes from the students who attend it. It gives them history about our new land claims agreement and what's going to be happening within our territory for the betterment and the wellness of our communities. It's a positive step when I see more and more educated young people, but the problem is that most of them move down south to bigger centres once they're educated. Again, that proves that once you're educated, you have many options in life. That's one of the things we want to encourage in our younger people in the smaller communities.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you.

I did say Greg would have the last question, but Mr. Weir has joined us, so you'll have the last question, Erin.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Thanks very much. I appreciate being here at the finance committee.

I normally serve on the government operations committee, and as part of our study of Canada Post and its future we travelled to the Northwest Territories, and there we found a great deal of support for the concept of postal banking. My sense is that Nunavut also has many remote communities that may not have banks or credit union branches, but I suspect many of them do have Canada Post outlets.

I wonder if you could just speak to us about the possibility of offering basic financial services from postal outlets. I think this would be a way of generating some additional revenue for Canada Post, and meeting a need that's out there for financial services. I'd really be interested in your thoughts on this proposal.

[Peter Taptuna]

It's very difficult when we talk about banks and credit unions for our smaller communities. Most of our folks are on Internet banking, and at the same time we see some difficulties in our small communities where employed people want to set up a mortgage to build their own homes and that's very difficult.

Maybe that's something it would serve me to look into and figure out ways to make it easier for members of our smaller communities to access services like that, because I know for a fact that it's very difficult for some of these younger folks to actually get bank loans and set up mortgages.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Absolutely.

I was also curious on your thoughts about the amount of territorial formula financing that Nunavut is receiving. I believe it's about $1.5 billion right now. Do you have any particular suggestions about that formula and how it might be improved?