Thank you, Madam Chair. Yesterday afternoon I was able to, in my Member's statement, give a quick sense of where I felt this budget will take us and, after a day's reflection and a good night's sleep on it, I can certainly say that I feel better as an MLA in this Assembly this year or today looking forward, than I did a year ago.

The fiscal picture has become much more certain for us and, to our credit and our benefit, we are able to see the vast majority of our programs maintained. We are able to see finally, after years and years of being choked back, Madam Chair, our capital investment and infrastructure program finally starting to come back to levels that would give us the chance to not only maintain and restore what we have, but maybe even do a few extra things. So we are in a much more stable and positive-looking position here.

The Minister and his people, Cabinet, deserve the acknowledgment and congratulations on this. They have, through my satisfaction through our committee work, kept us advised and informed of which way we wanted to take this government. So I have very little room to argue or criticize, Madam Chair. I have much more cause to be complimentary of where we are so far.

This does not entirely leave us off the hook. I use the collective word, Madam Chair, because as we go forward with this, we all need to recognize we have responsibility and accountability in how we manage and steward our resources.

As I said yesterday, the area that causes me the greatest discomfort is that our overall fiscal future is not ours to determine. In fact, where we have for years duked it out with the Department of Finance and the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs on what our fortunes are to be, now we have the creation of an expert panel on provincial-territorial equalization, if I have the term generally right, which is going to be a new bureaucratic administrative creature, Madam Chair, with a host of new people at it who I don't know how familiar they're going to be with our situation. I'm concerned, Madam Chair, that this panel has yet to be formally constituted and put to work. There's an expectation that by the end of this year we will have some decisions and criteria worked out. I want to be hopeful and optimistic that this is all going to happen, but we have seen these processes and deadlines come and go without really delivering. I would raise again this is where my caution is, where my concern is. So for the next fiscal year we will still not have the really well-defined, clear parameters of what our financial situation is to be. I do look forward to a positive outcome but, in the meantime, we still have a degree of instability, Madam Chair.

When I was listening to Mr. Roland's address I was keeping a bit of a score card and I think I have something like 12 points that came up for me on the good side of this budget, about seven or eight that were not so good, and a couple of wait-and-see items. I guess in the spirit of our discussion right now, Madam Chair, general comments, I would give you what to me are the highlights here and the things that I'm very pleased to see us take into the coming year.

We have the second highest employment rate in Canada in the Northwest Territories. We are going to be in our, is it fourth or fifth year, Mr. Premier or Mr. Finance Minister; our fourth or fifth year of double digit economic growth in the Northwest Territories. It's the fifth year, I hear. That's a remarkable record.

We have a fiscal policy approach, Madam Chair, that I'm especially supportive of because it will hopefully, with the collaboration of the folks in the Finance department in Ottawa, be able to free us from this outdated, outmoded, arbitrary debt wall that we operate in so much fear of. We are going to see a much more progressive way of planning our debt, looking at our borrowing. It's going to be, I think, very easy to manage. It will be easy to use. It will be easy to understand. This is one of the things that I think is a bit of a breakthrough for us. There's a lot of stuff that goes on with financing and with government that is impenetrable. It is really hard for people to grasp. This is a program that I think will be easy to understand.

The level of community government, devolution, if you will, is really healthy, especially on the infrastructure and dollar point of view. This is something that was on my list of objectives as a candidate and MLA, and I'm really pleased to see that we're going to be rolling this agenda out to improve and increase and expand governance at the community level.

The completion of the Rae to Yellowknife highway will happen next year, thank goodness; and here I think we have to acknowledge that Ottawa has come to the fore, realizing what our situation is and helped us accelerate this program.

The split of RWED is something that I think will, in the long run, serve us better.

Madam Chair, there are no new taxes or tax initiatives undertaken in this budget and I'm hopeful that for the rest of the term of this Assembly we will not need to undertake any other tax initiatives. We did a lot of work on that last year in this Assembly. I think it was good work, but I'm hopeful that we'll not have to go back to that again.

Madam Chair, as I said, the wait-and-see agenda has been outlined already with the panel that will decide our future for formula financing. I think we also have to put a watch on the agreement-in-principle on resource revenue sharing. The Premier has been very consistent in saying his expectation, his belief, his trust is in the Prime Minister to deliver on the agreement-in-principle by this spring with a final agreement by next year.

So that, Madam Chair, would cover my opening comments on this budget. I look forward to engaging in the line-by-line detail discussion of each department over the next few weeks. Thank you.