Thank you, Mr. Chair. Those are all very important issues, as those are core programs for the Northwest Territories. In previous governments when the government was flush with money, there were a lot of programs that were created.
We have to sit down and review those priorities. What areas do we want to see as continuing priorities, and what areas do we feel as an Assembly and as residents of the Northwest Territories we will have to forego?
We know, for example, that with non-insured health benefits we are going to hit the cap that the federal government has set in place. What will our approach be? I think, as I have said a number of times today, as we set priorities we are going to have to seriously consider the programs and services that we deliver on behalf of our residents, and ask ourselves what can we afford to deliver and still maintain the quality of life in the Northwest Territories?
Does it require turning back the education, culture and employment, or health and social services, or parts of the programs within that? If we are going to work in partnership with the aboriginal governments those are some of the issues we are going to have to deal with. We will have to come up with an arrangement. We know that aboriginal governments have been pushing for their own control of delivery of those programs in their communities, and the feds have started, for quite some time now, delivering programs in conjunction with the aboriginal governments in their communities. To a certain degree, it is already happening.
We know there were some groups after the health care dollars. The one thing we have to seriously look at is in communities where there is a large mixture of people, how does that impact the delivery of the system?
For example, I look at Inuvik where you have the Gwich'in, Inuvialuit, the non-aboriginal, as being, even sectors of the population. How do you make it work?
We know that by further developing things we also increase the area of administration costs. Fourteen percent of every dollar spent is spent on administration. How far can we go with that? Those are some of the issues we have to deal with. That is why a partnership is going to have to merge out of this. If we continue down the path we are currently on where one group does one thing, another does another thing; the ever-shrinking dollars will continue to shrink. We have to look at just about every community and look at the non-government organizations all trying to deal with certain issues in the community. How do we fix that? Those are some of the difficult decisions we are going to be faced with as a 14th Assembly. All of us around here are going to take part in that discussion, in setting the priorities. What can we continue to do? What can we not do? It has been forced upon us, but we are going to have to deal with that issue.
We know that it is a forecast that 18 months out we are going to hit the ceiling. After that there are no more choices. It is just going to be very negative. So we have to take the opportunity to make some changes early on. That is going to require some partnership working with the aboriginal governments in communities because a lot of them are delivering some of the programs. Is it going to be the case where they actually take over delivery of health care in their community or region? That is a possibility. We are going to have to see the implication on the ability to maintain standards for all residents in the Northwest Territories. So that is not an easy one to deal with.
Maybe the aboriginal governments out there are ready to take over forest fire suppression on their own. How do we take that out of the base? That is something we have to work on because one year expenditures are less than $9 million and another year it is $29 million. There is no set transfer, so that is going to be a difficult process and it will involve the three governments. Again, that shows the importance of the intergovernmental process. Thank you.