Thank you Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to give voice to longer term issues which will impact on all of our children. Everywhere in southern Canada, our major funding source, we are seeing governments and corporations deeply changing to build productivity. Trimming expectations to more realistic levels, carefully ranking all spending items. This territorial administration must now start to live within its means by setting closely measured priorities. Our fiscal adjustments cannot simply reduce spending to lower bottom lines, but also must reorganize for new efficiencies in the way government does things. Otherwise, other ordinary people will ultimately suffer because serious needs will not go away. People will still get sick, children will still need education.
With reductions in spending in the order of 25% and more, and many critical services in the mainstream, the Territories can no longer pretend that our unique geographic circumstance can protect us from doing our share in assisting Canada to live within its means. In order to do our share, we will have to accurately identify and remove non-performing waste wherever it is found within this administration. The penalty for not doing so in a serious revenue downturn, would be that the most needy in our society - the young, the old, the sick, the poor, women, the unemployed - would be abandoned. There are too many signs that the unravelling has already begun. Our first step in managing the situation is to study where we are at, at the present time. Detailed accountability through fuller disclosure is the first minimum step that we must take before sensible debate can begin. Why? Because public dollars spent for public purposes is public information. No cost to the current decisional discretion, you say, is $9 too much? I fear not.
Mr. Speaker, consider the fiscal secrecy of this administration effectively limits debate by inhibiting citizens who could offer support of direction and guidance to their MLAs, and further discourages entrepreneurs from proposing cost effective, privately levered, public service alternatives. Just the kind of things we all say we support. With these new directions under way, I am confident that at the end of the day, it will be a territorial people that will increasingly look after their own government. Thank you Mr. Speaker.