Two to four years, thank you. Two to four years' life out of this building and even then we are looking at shutting it down. Mr. Chairman, this pushes the notion of value for money way out there into the stratosphere. It's almost extraordinary that the department would bring such a scenario to the floor of the Assembly and ask for approval of it. If we do the math on this, as the Minister has already advised us on some previous projects, we are looking at an annual increase in the capital construction costs in the Northwest Territories of at least 10 percent per year. So we take something we know would cost us $19 million now, it's going to increase by about $2 million a year for every year that we don't do something about it. So even if we go the four-year window here, we're talking about adding somewhere in the neighbourhood of nine to $10 million by the time you compound it. We're looking at a $30 million building in four years that today would cost 19. I don't want to deny the people in Fort Simpson this kind of facility, but, Mr. Chairman, to ask us to approve this money and then still have nothing on a go-forward basis is astonishing.
Mrs. Groenewegen asked a very good question right upfront: what kind of options has the government looked at? Where are the private sector partners or in fact the aboriginal partners? The Dehcho aboriginal government has, by very skilful negotiating, managed to tap some fairly significant federal dollars. Are they interested, for instance, in making an investment in their own region, in their own infrastructure, just as one example of a potential partnership that's out there to help to do this? What I'm getting at, Mr. Chairman, is thinking outside the box, getting creative and involving the whole community, if not the whole region, into some answers. I cannot support this appropriation based on what we know, Mr. Chairman.
So that's the question that I would give back to the Minister is what other options, or is the Minister ready to go back to the region and back to the communities and give them the same ultimatum that he's presenting to the Assembly here and say what can we do to come up with a good solution that's going to suit everybody's needs and have some long-term use for it and some value for taxpayers' money, Mr. Chairman.