Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about the Business Incentive Policy review. Mr. Speaker, the government has claimed that the revisions they propose to the Business Incentive Policy are in the best interest of northern business. Yet I keep hearing from the northern business community that they have serious concerns regarding these proposed changes to the policy.

It seems, Mr. Speaker, that there are several fundamental problems with the proposed policy. I think that the Minister of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development must take another look at it based on the comments made by Members and northern business before Cabinet moves to adopt the policy.

The Minister has said that this government's procurement practices are intended to maximize benefits for residents of the Northwest Territories. However, we have heard concerns raised by northern business that the proposed new policy will not assist them as much as the current policy.

Business people I have talked to were surprised to hear about the proposal to impose caps, especially when the department says that business proposed that cap.

They failed to see why it would be in their best interests also to allow a Minister to decide arbitrarily whether a particular bid may be ineligible in determining Northwest Territories content.

Mr. Speaker, a lack of enforcement of the current policy has always been a concern of northern business. The new policy contains no real new commitment by the government to monitor the method in which it implements the policy.

So this proposed policy will provide incentives for businesses that employ northerners and file taxes in the Northwest Territories. This represents a significant change in the basic philosophy of the program. The existing program is set up to encourage the establishment and development of northern-owned business. The new program would be silent on business ownership. This change in the underlying philosophy should have first been discussed by Members of this Assembly, but it was not.

Mr. Speaker, before considering whether to maintain the current BIP or to change it, we should also know what the costs and benefits of the current policy are, but we do not. In the June sitting of this House, I asked the Minister of Public Works what the cost of BIP was to this government. He pulled a figure of $33 million out of the air. Then, he later wrote to me to indicate that the cost to his department was more accurately only $43,000. I am somewhat disturbed, Mr. Speaker, that the very public way misinformation was presented and then no offer was made to publicly retract it. That is a matter for another day.

Mr. Speaker, the bottom line is that we do not have good, baseline information on which to make decisions. The new policy is not ready for implementation without serious change. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

-- Applause