Thank you. General comments. Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you. The Honourable Premier, you can respond to Mr. Picco. Mr. Premier.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I agree with everything Mr. Picco said. But in seriousness, the Inuit Employment Plan the Minister of Education talked about today, that is part of it as well as Nunavut Unified Human Resource Development Strategy. Also, the federal government has committed $39.8 million to the strategy for the next four years. Our government will invest $101.4 million in education and training activities in Nunavut alone, and $1.6 million on planning and training initiatives. This year, the Department of Education, as well, is preparing a labour force development plan which is one of the six strategies developed to ensure the economic priorities set out in the 13th Assembly agenda for change are achieved. The goal of the plan is to strengthen to capacity the northern workforce to meet the demands of the labour market and to guarantee employment opportunities for northerners.

A draft of the Labour Force Development Plan has been completed and will be finalized by the end of October this year, Mr. Chairman. So we are putting things together. It is just a matter of bringing them all together in the one document, I guess, to present. So it is work that is ongoing and it will continue. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Premier. Member for Thebacha.

Thank you. There was no question about some directions from the honourable Member to the Premier. Mr. Premier.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I agree with Mr. Miltenberger that we have to communicate and we have to make sure that our good messages are getting out because, guaranteed, any bad messages the press will make sure they get out for us and so will the union. We all know that. So we are doing a lot of good things as a government and we have a lot of opportunity open to us yet. We do have a billion dollars. That is enough dollars to do some good in the Northwest Territories.

As far as the communication plan that is coming, we have worked on it since last year and then there was a change in staff so that stuff was put on hold. Basically, what we have to do -- and it includes all 24 of us -- is send out as much letters as we want because I have signed thousands of those letters. We can send out pamphlets -- and we have sent those out -- and we can sent out information to people in written form to communities. I know that Members to go their regional meetings and Members go to their community meetings and as well as our Assemblies during the summer and continue to tell people what the government is doing. The message still does not seem to be getting through so we are going to have to do more. Actually, Roy Romanow, Premier of Saskatchewan, told me to roll up our sleeves and go into our communities to actually explain and have charts and stuff that we can use so that people fully understand what we are doing, why we are doing it, and what good things we are doing as well.

With that, I look forward to working with Members on that issue. Thank you.

Thank you. General comments. Mr. Krutko.

Thank you. Mr. Premier.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We will never end up with a

surplus this year for the simple reason we are in a deficit to begin with and while we are trying to do is minimize that deficit, we as Members of the Assembly set out a fiscal recovery plan and we are sticking to that, and we are on target. There will be some cost overruns in some of the social envelope departments. That is my understanding, but that does not mean that will change our targets. It means that we have to shift some money around.

That is what it means, and we do not have any new money to draw on so we have to continue the stated course, and my understanding from the Minister of Finance is that, and he gave a statement in the House, yesterday, I believe, basically to say that we are on target and we will meet our target of the deficit or a certain dollar this year and then balanced budget for the next year. Thank you.

General comments to the statement. Mr. Krutko.

Thank you. Mr. Premier.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, in the Department of Transportation budget my understanding there was transfers of items from one capital project to another capital project still under the capital budget and they are still within their budget. As well as MACA there was a direct line transfer from community access road in Simpson to that community building in Fort Simpson, but that does not affect our targets at all. As far as winter road maintenance, the Department of Transportation has the capability of estimating the cost of removal of snow from roads and they go on long term figures and a formula and we have enough people there that are capable of doing that job so they should estimate fairly accurately. I cannot remember of any cost overruns of winter roads before, with snow removal. Thank you.

General comment, Mr. Krutko.

Thank you. Mr. Premier.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. No I would not be that foolish to do that. I cannot foretell the future and there may be changes in dollars spent from one department to the other and we will have to make the adjusts accordingly. Same as fighting forest fires. We cut that back two years ago from 28 million, I think, to cap at 13 million. Since then we have been fighting fire at that cost. This year we managed to save a million dollars, I believe, or some amount of money, not a bit, because we were lucky enough to have rain. My understanding is by having all the rain we have to spend a little bit of extra on maintaining some of our gravel roads because the rain washed some of them out. So, you are going to get money moving around like that. I

cannot guarantee, or no one can guarantee that there would be no cost overruns.

Thank you. Any further general comments. Mr. Krutko.

Thank you. Mr. Premier.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Like I said it is around a million dollars, I believe I have heard that figure, but I have never seen that exact figure. The way it works is that you draw down money. Not every department has it's own bank account. We have one bank account for the Government. We all draw down on it, and, if they did save a million dollars, then it would be a million less that they would be writing cheques on, borrowing basically, because we borrow, we are borrowing money, and so, I do not really know how to answer the Member's question other than, that is the way it works. I do not know the exact amount.