Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that we will be spending the next two to three weeks discussing our budget, but I just want to offer my initial comment on what we heard earlier this afternoon.
Mr. Speaker, from where I sit, the most significant thing that I noticed in this budget was a black and white statement that it is highly unlikely that we will see any money from the federal government on resource revenue sharing until at least 2007. I have to commend the Minister of Finance in accepting and recognizing that reality, because I was here in the last Assembly and I was always not very comfortable and I always argued that we had to operate our budget under the realities that we're living in. While it is commendable and it's desirable that we should all be out there lobbying for more money from the federal government, we shouldn't be budgeting ourselves on dreams. In many ways, that's what we were doing. I mean, it's good to be optimistic and good to be lobbying for money, but we had to be more responsible with what we were doing. So I think it's very good that the Minister of Finance has put it out in black and white that we have to deal with the situation as we find it.
Another thing that the Minister said is that he would like to see our operating budget books balanced by 2007. So he has really set himself a huge task here. He's saying we're not going to see resource revenue sharing, but we're going to have a balanced budget and all by 2007. That should really give us a warning that we have our work cut out for ourselves, that we are dealing with so many more restrictions than we had in the last Assembly, where it seemed like we could just spend our way through anything on the notion of optimism and dreams and what seemed to be a bright future that was as bright as a diamond itself.
Mr. Speaker, I think there are a lot of other things we did. We lowered the corporate tax when it was actually
penalizing us, we spent the windfall money that I always thought would not penalize as much. So I don't want to go back to where we were, but I think it is really good that we are starting off on our budget with the reality of where we are, and that the priority still is to make sure that whatever money we have is spent in the best way we can, and that all essential programs and services are protected. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.