Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to make a brief comment in support of the general, I guess, thrust of this bill. As other Members have stated already, it's not an area that we have a whole lot of control over in terms of having options about what to do with the shortfalls that we have experienced from raising the corporate tax a couple of years ago in the first place. So I support this bill in light of the fact that that seems to be the only option we have really to recover, or at least not have happen to us again a shortfall of money as much as $30 million, because that is not a small amount of money and one that we need to address to make sure that we don't have that sort of shortfall in revenue in the years to come. But I think I share with the sentiment of other Members here that speaks to the fact that we do need to get better control of, or try to get more control of our financial leverages, I guess, so to speak. In some ways this might be one that we have control over because at least it's 100 percent within our control to raise, or increase, or decrease, our corporate tax rates depending on and to make fiscal decisions. Although, increasing it has cost us, but is within our control in terms of passing the law and trying to adjust that depending on what the outcome is to our purse, so to speak.
But there's a lot of outstanding issues out there for the Minister to take care of and formula financing is one of them. I mean, the mechanism in there is that's making us to have a shortfall on, or defective mechanism, or the perversity, or however you want to put it, you know, just basic fiscal system and arrangements we have whether it's under not only in formula financing, but all the
clawbacks and it's the system we have with the federal government that makes it difficult for us to have 100 percent control. So obviously the biggest task at hand for the Minister is to work on those other big files and I'm a little concerned.
I appreciate that there's a great need for the Premier and everybody to get really, really excited to send out positive messages for the new government and you want to develop a good relationship, and you want to get on the good books, but I'm not sure if the past practice of this government talking about how much we appreciated federal politicians in Ottawa, especially the Prime Minister, I don't know if that gets us far. I think what will get us far is for us to really get behind the door, and get behind the door or close the door and, you know, work out a deal. I think whatever goodwill there might be being created by the Premier and the new Prime Minister and all the counterparts of the Ministers here, I think that window of opportunity for working out a negotiation and getting a deal is quite short. I know and I'm sure there's lots of provinces, and leaders, and NGOs, and all sorts of groups that are trying to get attention of the new government, but we really need to, and this Minister has to focus on getting down there and getting to the ear of the new Finance Minister, who sounds like he's pretty, I don't know him personally, but from what I see on TV he might be a hard negotiator and we need to really get our...I know we could do a lot of discussions here about how bad the federal government is and they're not listening and it's all their fault and it's one Minister after another, it's one Prime Minister after another, but sooner or later, and we're at the last leg of this Assembly really, we only have a year-and-a-half left, sooner or later I do believe that the people of the North have the right to ask us to account for what we have been able to do. Politicians are judged by the deals we make or the deals we don't make and I would like to encourage, once again, and, as I've stated in my reply to the budget address, or the first statement I made, I still expect the Finance Minister or this Minister to come out and turn green, or turn out to be an incredible hulk, or maybe he could just be in his quiet self, I don't know, but whatever tactics he uses there is not a lot of time left for him to really get us a deal.
I know it's hard for me to talk about budget without talking about these other things, Novel housing concept. Oh, I wasn't supposed to mention that, sorry, new product concept, but I have a legitimate concern there and that is that I think this Minister of Finance has a lot of work to do to get a better income tax system so that we don't get penalized for going up and down on corporate tax. The Member from Kam Lake talked about why do we get penalized for something that we didn't have control over, and I just think the agenda and the action item for the Minister should be just a couple of things and he has to concentrate on that, and to clutter his agenda with other items is problematic for me when other parties can do their jobs just fine.
On that note, that's just a long way to say that I support this reluctantly because we don't really have a choice to do it and I wanted to plug in, once again, before we adjourn this budget session, that I would like to see the Minister spend a lot of time in Ottawa and getting to know Minister Flaherty and try to resolve this resource revenue sharing. Thank you.