Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have some brief opening comments. General comments about the budget. Mr. Chairman, one of the key issues that I touched on yesterday, which was addressed through a motion as well, was the issue of a need for clear measurable targets and goals so that government and departments can be held accountable and that we require of ourselves as government, the same stringent requirements that we have in terms of information and targets that we ask of all those agencies and boards that are funded by the government.
Very clearly, as today's discussion and debate in the House has indicated the human resource issue is a very big one. The issue of a Public Service Commission is one key issue, but the other one as well over the last four or five years has been the fragmentation of the human resource service in government. This is a corporation that services thousands of employees, but it has been balkanized. There is a need for an overall human strategy, which I hope that this government will address.
As an MLA from a small community in the South Slave, I am very concerned about growth in headquarters as I was during the interim appropriation and when we were looking at supplementary appropriations for the Executive. I think that it is critical that the Executive continues to lead by example. We have to recognize all the facts that have been mentioned before with Nunavut and the loss of half the jurisdiction or 40 percent of the jurisdiction. The shrinkage in the political area, especially when we are asking the municipalities' tax bases to take a cut. I recognize the fact there has been some growth, like education, as the Minister has pointed out which are good and supported by this house. However, we have to be very vigilant and cognizant at all times of the insidious growth that always occurs quietly and under the cover of administrative requirements at headquarters.
Another issue that I think I have to draw attention to is the informatics issue that has been raised in this government and in this budget. Mr. Chairman, this particular strategy has been out there. They have been planning for years.
When I was superintendent, that goes back five or six years ago now, this was on the table and the government appears no closer to any kind of comprehensive coordinated strategy. The departments are unconnected. Information is fire-walled off. There is no ability to coordinate, consolidate, and share on areas where it is necessary. Even in the social envelope it is clear within departments that there is still work to be done, like the child welfare information system.
We have a government in the 21st century that still has to hand count the paper to get statistics. We have the PeopleSoft system, where the health boards and education boards are not included, which we have paid millions for. I think we should be looking at a thorough review of how that was implemented. We have tied our star to that particular system and, at the very least, part of this comprehensive review of the human resource strategy should look at those kinds of issues. It is tied directly to the informatics system.
I am also very concerned about the digital communication network, which we bought into, which we are committed to for the next few years. We could have the best systems in the world sitting in our offices but if the pipelines to get information around are inadequate, antiquated, outdated, cannot carry the load, do not have the band width, then we are stuck. You can have a $10,000 computer system and you cannot tie into the rest of the world. It defeats the purpose.
For myself as well, an ongoing issue has been the pressing, insistent and growing need for meaningful cooperation between departments, in planning and business plans and strategic developments and programs that are being moved ahead. The communities made it very clear to me, where I have travelled, that it is not enough for the government to come in and tell communities and boards and agencies and groups to work together. Then everybody goes back to Yellowknife and it appears that the departments rarely talk to each other. And the business plans reflect, once again, at least in the social program area that whatever cooperation is there is cursory at best.
I know that it takes months sometimes to get the social program Ministers in the same room to talk about an agenda given the constraints of time and other pressing agenda items. This Cabinet has chosen as well to put two other Ministers into the mix with portfolios where they do not have any resources and for me the mandate is not clear, Mr. Allen for Youth and Mr. Steen for Seniors.
It is a cause of concern. While it is nice to have a Minister specifically acknowledged and targeted and tasked with that function, I think that there has to be work done in terms of the mandate and how do you actually bring the resources to bear so that when the Minister responsible for Youth speaks, he speaks with the full backing and resources that the government has at its command for that area. The resources are significant. They are scattered across a couple of departments but when you target all the money that is there for children and youth, it is a significant amount of cash.
When you look at the money that is there for seniors, scattered across government there are significant amounts of money and that often is not recognized. While it was a positive step, I think the government has to make some serious concerted efforts to demonstrate to us and to the people that they are working together, that they talk to each other and for me, Mr. Chairman, I would look for the day where in key areas, a joint business plan is put out in the social envelope that links services to seniors or links healthy children, that demonstrates that in fact the departments are working together and not coming to the table often using different terminology for the same strategy.
This could be considered something of a stand-pat budget, Mr. Chairman, as the Minister responsible for Finance has indicated. Unfortunately one of the reasons is, is that a lot of the work that was to be done has not been done. The functional review was supposed to have been done months and months ago. This was supposed to form the basis for planning. We are still waiting for that.
The economic strategy is far past the gestation period of an elephant and we are still waiting for something, a birth, a presence, of something coming forward. I know that they have been working for months. But at the 13th Assembly it was a tortuous experience in terms of getting organized on that particular issue. And here we are planning for the financial future of the Territory without that critical component at our fingertips so that we can incorporate some of the findings and strategies and recommendations that they are making.
I will have many questions as we go through department by department. I just wanted to make those general ones and I am also going to be watching and very interested in how successful we are with the issue of momentum. Especially in southern jurisdictions, we have put a lot of our financial eggs and hopes and aspirations in the basket of new revenues from the federal government in the very near future. We recognize, with the debt wall, that the time we have shrinks daily in terms of the new revenues that are required to maintain even the level of services we now have. We know that if we are not successful, then the decisions that we make the next time around will be, in fact, much more difficult. It would be very similar, I would suggest, to the dark days of the early years of the 13th Assembly, where we had to make very tough decisions because the revenues clearly did not meet our expenditures.
The money, for me, is an issue, but a lot of these other process issues and structural issues are equally critical as we try to become an effective and efficient government. It is not just a revenue problem, but an expenditure problem, and we spend money, as a government, in many ways that are sometimes not effective, efficient, or economical. Thank you.