Mr. Speaker, I would like to get involved in the last bit of the debate that is going back and forth.
I have some personal knowledge of the hydro dams in northern Manitoba. I worked on them as a carpenter. It was a good source of work for me but I was also quite sympathetic with what was being done in the outlying areas. I visited some of the communities prior to their being flooded and then again after they were flooded.
To help shed some light on the questions raised by the member for Wetaskiwin, I think that in 1977 when the northern flood agreement was finally negotiated it was actually about seven years after the main damage of flooding was done.
When the first big wave of flooding happened, the Notigi diversion from the Churchill River into the Nelson River, nobody really understood just how devastating that would be. They actually thought raw land could be flooded without clearing any of the trees first. They were flooding whole forests. They did not realize that mercury and other stuff leeching out of the soil after years would kill off the fish stocks. A mumbo-jumbo of trees fell to the point where the lakes were not navigable, even if people did want to fish.
In and around 1970 it was an NDP government that orchestrated a lot of the original flooding. It completely underestimated the damage from what it was doing. The government thought it could simply take people from one community, transplant them and flood the old land and they would still be able to use the lake and land in the same way. It just was not true.
When the northern flood agreement was negotiated, it was clear that far more compensation would be needed and far more impact studies would have to be done before any real package could be arrived at.
Happily we are now at the point where a lot of this stuff is being remedied. A lot of measures are being taken to try to put these people's lives back in order.
Somebody mentioned that $76 million is involved in the Norway House case. It is a lot of money, but the net profit to Manitoba from selling hydroelectricity is $250 million to $300 million per year. It is a huge revenue producer. Manitobans also get the lowest hydroelectricity costs anywhere in the country, two and a half cents per kilowatt which is about one-third of those in many other places.