Good morning.
If I weren't sitting so far away in Yellowknife, I'd feel somewhat underdressed compared to the rest of you folks, but I'll carry on regardless.
The Northwest Territories is a land of enormous wealth—wealth that is seen in the land as it now exists—with enormous portions of boreal forest and water, and ecosystems that are without parallel anywhere in the world. It's also enormously wealthy with the resources that are under the land: the diamonds, the oil, the gas, and the rare metals.
The challenge for us—and for all of us—is sustainable development. Our legislative assembly has a vision of strong individuals, families, and communities sharing the benefits and responsibilities of a unified, environmentally sustainable, and prosperous NWT. How do we do this?
We have a lot of things under way that are going to help us as northerners to do the right things. Most importantly, we are one of two jurisdictions left in this country that do not have control over land, water, and resource development—ourselves and Nunavut. We are very close to signing a devolution agreement that will finally give us the final piece, the final levers that we need as northerners to manage land, water, and resource development so that decisions in the north are made by northerners, for northerners, and in the best interests of northerners.
As well, that ties into regulatory reform. Devolution is going to be one of the biggest parts of regulatory reform, because it's going to mean that we can make decisions in the north without having to go to Ottawa and wait for months and sometimes years for bureaucrats and politicians in Ottawa to make decisions that should be—and soon will be—made in the north.
At the same time, the federal government has embarked upon their own process of regulatory reform that—as you can see after listening to Dr. MacDonald—has had a strong response from a lot of the aboriginal governments. We're going to have to balance out the approach going forward, but for us, the key is devolution.
In terms of resource development, we are challenged by some significant factors. One of the big ones is energy, including the cost to run a business and to do business in the north in mines in remote locations, where you have to import diesel fuel. In some cases it's $1.50 to $1.60 a litre for fuel.
It's the same challenge that we have in our small communities in providing electricity. We in the Northwest Territories are intent on coming forward with an energy plan that's going to see us do hydro interconnects in the north and south Slave, the Slave geological province, so we can have transmission lines that allow us to move the hydro that we do have available in the Snare and the Talston systems, transmission lines so we'll be able to link them together and can in fact do some expansions and be in a position to provide energy at reasonable costs to some of the proponents for some of the mines, such as the Avalon Rare Metals, Tamerlane, and NICO mines. The long term, of course, would be for the future development, where the diamond mines currently reside.
We also want to come forward with a solar plan that's going to allow us to help lower the costs in the small communities by putting solar to a target of about 10% penetration. Also, in the far north around Inuvik, we want to sort out the problems related to the depletion of the current natural gas wells and what the opportunities are there.
We are making what are for us very substantial investments in biomass, geothermal, solar, and wind. We see these as critical developments that are going to allow us to in fact have a sustainable cost of living in the north and a cost of doing business so that businesses can come in and run their businesses in an environmentally sustainable way that's affordable.
One of the big corporate examples I can point to is the Diavik mine, one of the diamond mines north of Yellowknife. They're installing some very big wind turbines that are going to help cut their costs by up to 30%. It's a $24-million investment that will be repaid in about five years from the savings they're going to generate. They've done thorough testing to make sure they're making the right decision.
Our challenge is the fiscal constraint we have to operate under. Right now we have a borrowing limit of $800 million. We have over the last number of years, like every other government, worked through the recession and taken advantage of stimulus funding. We have accrued a debt of about $656 million, which means we have about $144 million of borrowing room between our borrowing limit and what we have currently in debt.
We have the grid interconnects I was talking about. That's a $750,000 ticket item. We know that up north we want to invest in the Tuktoyaktuk-Inuvik highway. That initially started out at about $200 million. That project, with some help from the federal government, is now going to be much closer, in our estimation, to $300 million.
Inuvik is going to be one of two sites in the entire world that does remote sensing, and we want to put a fibre optic line down the valley so that we can have Inuvik provide that remote-sensing service. But they need to be able to have access to that information right away; we need to have a fibre optic line down the valley. That's a project that will open up the whole territory. It has a price tag of about $80 million.
So those are just a couple of the fiscal constraints we have, good projects that would benefit Canada and the Northwest Territories, but we are limited because of our fiscal limitations.
As we go forward we are very concerned about the balance of resource development and environment. We are open for business. We want to do it in a sustainable way. We want to invest heavily in infrastructure, not only the energy infrastructure, but roads as well, so that we can get the roads to resources that former Prime Minister Diefenbaker talked about. The time is now. We have some huge oil play in the Sahtu region that's going to require some investment. We want to do that in a planned way. We want to work with the communities to make sure that we look at their costs with alternative energy. We want to work with the mines to look at what other alternative energies are there, besides just relying on the incredibly expensive diesel.
To do all this properly.... I want to get back and conclude with the need to have the devolution agreement signed and have a strong post-devolution deal, an arrangement with Ottawa. Then northerners in the Northwest Territories will finally be able to truly chart their own course to the future.
Thank you.