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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - The Yellowknife Chamber of Commerce wants the GNWT to reduce and prioritize its spending, including perhaps contracting out the management of the power corporation or selling it outright.

A letter submitted to Premier Floyd Roland and Finance Minister Michael Miltenberger suggested an aggressive program to attract new and returning residents and to reduce spending to spark significant revenue growth for government and business.

Yk Chamber of Commerce president Jon Jaque said reducing duplication is an exercise all businesses go through on a regular basis.

"Our objective of the paper is to provide some ideas to the government to reduce costs where there is duplications in infrastructure and where going to a privatized scenario would be more cost effective," Jaque said. "There is a certain amount of duplication in the power distribution in the NWT."

Dave Ramsay, MLA for Kam Lake, said he agrees with Jaque.

"We have to do something with the power corporation," he said. "Something is amiss here. Rates continue to go up and consumption is going down and how are we rewarded? Higher power rates. It just doesn't make sense to the guy on the street and it doesn't make sense to me."

A thorough review of the power corporation mandate is needed, according to Ramsay.

"Its mandate should be to get the lowest possible power rates so people aren't paying these high rates," he said. "If they can cut costs, if they can downsize and do that as efficiently and effectively as possible, it's something they should be doing. It's questionable if they are doing that today."

The chamber also recommended offering a Northern incentive through a tax holiday to attract people to move here.

"Finding the simplest option was important," Jaque said. "Something that was easy to administer, something that could provide a very tangible and attractive incentive that's easy to market and easy to promote was our goal."

The incentive would be structured into a three-tiered system. A person moving to a smaller community would receive a $20,000 tax holiday, a $15,000 tax holiday for moving to a regional centre and a $10,000 tax holiday for moving to Yellowknife. The chamber suggests it be broken down into a multi-year tax holiday where people wouldn't have to pay territorial income tax.

"Having a program that the government can effectively market to southern areas is very important and this tax holiday is certainly easy to talk about," Jaque said.

Ramsay commends the chamber for presenting creative options for solving the revenue problem.

"The incentive option is thinking outside the box and coming up with a new way of attracting people here," he said. "The immigration option is an important aspect as well."

The chamber recommended working out arrangements with the federal government to fast-track immigration which would help bring more workers into the territory as well as an additional $22,000 per person under the federal transfer payments.

"We need to attract people here but we also need to retain the people we have," Ramsay said.

Finance Minister Michael Miltenberger was unavailable for comment at press time.