Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, before I start, I would like to congratulate the Minister of Finance on his first budget, although we are in a way balancing our budget, I guess it is still technically a deficit budget because we are going over our allocated revenues and using up our surplus from last year which, of course, only occurred because of the one-time injection of revenue from the federal government due to our population.

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to indicate that we do indeed have a lot of social challenges as the Minister has indicated in his address, and we are trying to address those social challenges. We have extended grades, this has increased enrolments in the communities and the people who required a better education are taking advantage of that. Many of the community people, the aboriginal people, are dropping out at the grade 9 or grade 10 level and this seems to be helping. I too, would like to commend the Minister for putting more money into the school system to ensure that the pupil/teacher ratio is maintained. However, Mr. Speaker, as we have heard, we do have the highest pupil/teacher ratio in Canada and simply putting enough money into the system to maintain the current ratio is not good enough. We need to decrease that ratio. We need to work on making the amount of students in our classrooms less in relation to the amount of teachers there. Particularly with social passing and inclusive schooling, we need more assistance in those classrooms. Mr. Speaker, while I think it was a good move to ensure that the pupil/teacher ratio does not increase, I think we have to work at decreasing that.

The Working Together Program, which provides employers with a wage subsidy to help students work in the summer and basically I guess this is for during the year as well, putting more money back into this program as it was supposed to end this year, was a very good move. I certainly support that 100 percent. Also Mr. Speaker, the Investing in People Program, was also supposed to end this year, and the Minister was able to find $1 million to put into this program to help keep adult basic education in some communities for the first time were able to get adult basic education. I fully support this as well. Hopefully, this will mean that the program for the first time was supported in Yellowknife North constituency of Detah, Ndilo will continue to be supported this year.

Mr. Speaker, I was very pleased to see in the Minister's comments that children are a priority of this government and of course we all support that and we support the continued support of the Health Children Initiative. Under health care, Mr. Speaker, we all know that the turn over rate for nurses is very high and this, I guess, substantiates that it is much higher than the governments staff average turnover. This also substantiates that our salary and benefits packages have not remained competitive enough with southern jurisdictions. We have been asking that in the past and I do not think we have received a straight answer. So this substantiates that. I am very glad to see we are putting more money into recruitment and retention in the health care area, specifically scholarships, summer employment and $3 million for salary incentives. I do not know how they are going to do that. I understand we have unionized workers and as far as I know, we have just finished signing an agreement. How this is done I suppose, will have to be done very carefully, and with the cooperation and assistance of the unions. It is a good move, because we cannot offer less than the provinces are offering, because people will naturally go to a warmer climate. The majority of them anyways.

Mr. Speaker, the one area that does concern me, I do not see anything in here relating to housing. Since this government saw fit to do away with the housing that we used to provide for our teachers, nurses and other staff personnel, we seem to be having a hard time hanging on to those personnel. People are moving at an alarming rate and obviously this is substantiated in here when it says that the turnover rate for nurses is much higher than the government staff average and those are the nurses in the smaller communities. So this still has to be dealt with.

Mr. Speaker, I am very glad to see we are putting some money into the justice system, to improve the community justice and correction services and to have a dedicated probation and parole service that will work specifically on parole services and probation services. This has been needed for a long time and we have spoken about this in the past as Members of the social programs committee and also on the rehabilitation programs. We know that particularly in the Yellowknife Correctional Centre, the situation is so bad that the spaces that had been at one time put in place for adult basic education or whatever type of rehabilitation programs, those are all now used to warehouse those inmates. I recently had an opportunity to visit the Yellowknife Correctional Centre and I was appalled, Mr. Speaker. There is absolutely no room, I think there is one room that is available for art and that is about it. Every place else, even places where they were supposed to be eating and for recreation, those are now all used up with bunks to house the inmates. The renovations to the Yellowknife Correctional Centre are very, very welcome. I am glad to see this is happening.

The Community Assistance, Fire Prevention and Safety Program that has been initiated, I think is long overdue. Every year we hear of another school, or co-op building or something else that has been burned down whether by accident or through arson, and this is a huge drain on our resources. Obviously it is a shock to the community, as well, when these types of facilities are lost. The fire prevention and safety program is very welcome.

Mr. Speaker, in the area of housing I would also like to mention that the Cabinet made a very, very good move when they initiated the Minimum Down Payment Assistance Program. I know particularly in Yellowknife with the loss of jobs and the uncertainty created by Giant, Con mines and other areas, there were a lot of people who had their houses on the market and they were not able to sell those houses. This has given those people an opportunity to sell their houses. Many of them may have actually lost their homes because they were not able to meet their mortgage payments. This has now given them an opportunity to get out of those commitments and to allow other people who do have the money to meet their mortgage payments, but may not have had the money for the down payment. This has helped out on both sides of the fence, the people who were waiting, perhaps were saving and would have had to save for years in order to get into a home, it has helped those people. It has also helped those people who could not sell their homes. I believe this was a very good initiative. Obviously there have been some complaints that there were not enough restrictions but, of course, it is always easier with hindsight to say you could have done this, you could have done that. I believe if we do this again in the future the Cabinet and the Minister responsible for Housing will have the benefit of this past experience to put some more restrictions in place so that perhaps some of these loopholes will be covered.

Mr. Speaker, we know that we are going to need a lot of jobs in the future for our young people. We have the youngest population in Canada and I am glad to see we are putting some money into projects to take advantage of the new diamond mines and those types of activities. I am also am glad to see that the resource potential in oil and gas has not been forgotten. We have heard many times in this House where people such as Mr. Krutko, who has those potentials in his area, have been very concerned about this.

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to see that we are looking at economic diversification because we simply cannot rely on mega projects such as those diamond mines and other mines. We cannot rely on those alone. The mines are only in existence for a certain period of time. We have seen time and time again that it is not the community people who take advantage of the jobs and the economic opportunities that are presented when these mega projects happen. A lot of these opportunities go to southern people and to southern companies. I am very glad to see this government looking at economic diversification and I certainly hope that we are talking about looking at things like tourism and other investments so that some of the communities like Kakisa, Detah, Fort McPherson, those smaller communities can also benefit.

Mr. Speaker, I am very glad to see that there is no increase in our tax rates. I know that people are always saying we need more revenue, we need more revenue, but we simply cannot afford to tax our people at a higher rate. If we really sat down and analyzed how much money would be generated by increasing taxes, it is not that great an amount. Rather than placing a greater burden on our people and actually scaring people from moving up here, I think it is a good move to keep these rates lower so that people will not be frightened off and will move up here. Particularly, corporate income tax rates, we do have the lowest with the exception of Quebec and I think we have to keep that in place because it is expensive enough for corporations to move up here and to do business, we do not also have to have a high corporate tax system so that it is an added burden on them to do business up here. Of course, this does not mean that we have to give them an open cheque book and let them do all kinds of environmental damage and the rest of that. This all has to come hand in hand, but I think it is a good move to keep our corporate taxes low.

Mr. Speaker, there has been a lot of talk about gaining northern control of northern resources and getting some movement on the tax window so that we can benefit more from the taxes and the royalty revenues from the new mines and any other new developments that occur. Mr. Speaker, obviously with a decline in our population and people have moved out of the territories due to losses of jobs, insecurity, and those types of things, because of that our budget will remain the same or perhaps even go lower in the future. We do need additional resources but we cannot get those additional resources, we cannot make a deal with the federal government on our own, we have to make that deal with the aboriginal governments. We know that, the aboriginal governments know that, because the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development has stated that we have to do that. We have to have all the aboriginal governments, the main aboriginal governments on side. They have to agree.

I am glad to hear and to see in writing that the Minister of Finance says we have to do this in partnership with the aboriginal governments because we know that in the recent past there were some aboriginal governments who took exception with some of our Cabinet Members. They had mistakenly thought that the government was trying to move ahead on their own. We know from our meetings that this government is not moving ahead on its own and wishes to work in partnership with the aboriginal governments. I would like to encourage our Cabinet colleagues to try to move ahead as quickly as possible so that we can, in fact, ensure that we do gain control over those resources and perhaps are able to get a greater tax window and greater royalties from the resources in the Northwest Territories. As we all know, Mr. Speaker, if we do not do that it will mean a decrease in our programs and services. It will mean that the programs and services that we can provide to our constituents will not be as good as they are today. I do not think that anybody wants that. Thank you.

--Applause