Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My question is to the Minister of Finance in regards to fairness and how money is allocated.

You did a study based over the last 10 years. I did some research myself based on 9 years and I have come up with some numbers which sort of baffle my constituency when you come to fairness and money spent in different ridings over the last 9 years on projects.

My average based on a per capita spending based on the same ridings and the same size communities works out to about $1,200.00 per person. The next closest riding which is Nunakput which is $2,300.00 per person is almost twice as much as what I arrived which is a similar size region.

And then from there basically it goes up. So I think you talk about fairness and the amount of money that is being spent over the years, I mean it is based on my capital dollars over the last nine years, it works out to about two million dollars average out of my three communities yet the next closest community is Nunakput with 3.8 million.

So, I mean, there definitely is not a balance there. There has to be more of a fairness. You talk about fairness and be able to move stuff around. I mean, the Minister was in my riding where there was that construction of a new garage in which there was allocated $600,000.00 at the end of the day the department made a decision, well, we will give you $50,000.00 to upgrade the old facilities you have.

But that was taken out of their capital planning expenditures, yet they are still arguing with the department what happened. Yet something like this happens, it seems like you talk about community empowerment and also the whole question about communities want to take on more powers.

In my riding, my communities are saying there is no way we are taking over that because there is nothing there for us. Or basically the till is empty and there is no money in it. So why should we take over something that does not make economic sense for us to run on the resources we are getting, which is nothing.

So, how can you talk about community empowerment and how great it is for everybody yet in my riding, in the case of Aklavik, they get $300,000.00 a year to run a community of over 800 people. They do not even have money to fix their potholes to get gravel.

So I think you talk about fairness, you talk about balancing, trying to deal with everybody on an equal platform, use my riding for an example. Because I am at the bottom of the barrel, and if I got any deeper I will be hitting bottom.

When we talk about fairness here, let us look at all the constituencies and let us look at the numbers, and speak what they want. I would like to see the Minister of Finance's statistics. The whole idea of capital dollars and how they are moved around, there has to be some sort of a process that it has to follow in order to meet the expectations of not only the Ministers or the MLAs but also this House, so that they are not stuck in a situation that we are in now.

I think we have to somehow either develop guidelines, or I think because of the problem we are in, dealing with the deficit, that there has to be some direction from the Minister of Finance to all departments that there has to be a mechanism that either these dollars which are not ear-marked for particular projects cannot be moved around for other projects that are not associated with that type of activity. With that I would just like to remind the other Members here that I would like the Minister of Finance's statements, when he talks about fairness, because I sure as heck would like to be fairly treated like everyone else.