Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'd like to take this opportunity today to talk about the budget, about the economy, and where do we go from here.
The Minister, yesterday in his statement, referenced the challenges going forward. Those focussed almost exclusively on resource development and there was limited reference to the issues related to the environment as it pertains to resource development, and there was very limited reference to one of the great big economic stressors that we have and those are the expenditure issues.
Mr. Speaker, as we go forward, we're looking to build a sustainable society and a strong economy. There are two fundamental building blocks to do that. One of them is a healthy environment and then you get healthy people.
Mr. Speaker, there are two components to the budget. There's the revenue side and there's the expenditure side. As we look at all the issues of resource development, we have to do a better job factoring in the effects of the environment. We know from the Caribou Summit that there are things happening to the animals, to the land. We know there are things happening to the water.
The Intergovernmental Committee on Climate Change that released their report demonstrated very clearly that in the North we are going to be paying a big price. So as we look to the future, as northerners we have to gather and ask some very basic questions. How fast do we want to develop? What pace can we sustain? What is in the best interest of northerners as we do this? How many diamond mines do we need at any one time? How much oil and gas exploration can the land sustain? We can't just focus on what's happening in the Northwest Territories; we have to look around us at jurisdictions that impact on us. Specifically the one I want to talk about is Alberta.
We know that they are engaged in a very aggressive resource development agenda, that there are severe and significant concerns of what impact that's going to have on the Northwest Territories with the water, with the land, with the animals, with the air with the long-range pollutants. When we talk about caribou, we're not just talking about barren-land caribou here, we're talking about the woodland caribou. There is major habitat disruption and destruction going on. If you overlay in Alberta the agriculture, the forestry, the mining, the oil and gas, the irrigation, there is blessed little left in Alberta that's not going to be developed, and we have to take a page and recognize what can we learn from that. Is that the type of agenda we want in the Northwest Territories? I would submit to you that it's not. I would submit to you that it's unsustainable. Neither the federal government nor the Alberta government, working together for seven years, have been able to come up with the cumulative impact of the massive development that's going on in Alberta.
We in the Northwest Territories are no better off. We cannot tell people or demonstrate what is the cumulative impact of what has happened and is going to happen around us. When you look at even the recent past, Giant Mine, Pine Point, the proposed pipeline, four diamond mines, the fact that there's leases across the North through all the wintering grounds of the caribou, through the calving grounds of the caribou as well. So we have some very serious questions to ask in debate as territory as we go forward. We cannot look project by project anymore.
The challenge then, Mr. Speaker, is for us to look at those questions, to identify those questions and to come up with ways to answer them. Our life depends on this; our land depends on this; the future of our children depend on this. What is in the best interest of northerners? That is the challenge on the revenue side. We can generate the wealth that people are lined up, businesses are lined up, to come to the Northwest Territories to extract the resources and make the maximum benefit of what is there. The Mackenzie gas pipeline is a case in point. Our job, as legislators, as residents of this land, is to make sure that we take the broad view that allows us, for the sake of our children and our grandchildren and those far into the future, that we have made the right choices. There is no need, in my mind, to rush to develop every resource we have in this land as fast as we can as soon as we can. If we do not benefit, then we should not proceed. If we do not get a devolution agreement and a resource revenue sharing agreement, should we continue at any kind of breakneck pace to extract the resources and have all those royalties, as my colleague from Inuvik said, go south? It is poor business. It is poor
stewardship. It's something I don't think we should be doing.
If we do get a devolution agreement, then we can better control the pace of development. Right now, we rely on the federal government and that is the unfortunate reality.
As we look at what tools do we have, independence is not there. But I would suggest that this territorial Legislature should consider having a carbon tax in place, all the instruments necessary to use should we need it. I think it's a very clear message. It's one thing to worry about the bad message that we're sending to business, but we can't stand here year after year with the hundreds of millions verging on billions of dollars that have been taken out of here, that we have no control and no ability to get our fair share of. Every diamond, every barrel of gas and oil that goes is gone. It's not retroactive. We've already lost 10 years with the diamond mines that we will never get back.
One of the other things that is going to be very critically important to us as we move forward is how do we work with the aboriginal governments as we try to defend and protect the land, environment and the people of the Northwest Territories when we deal outside our jurisdiction? I would suggest to you that up to this point it's been the aboriginal governments that have carried the can, carried the freight, carried the weight, to go to other jurisdictions like Alberta to meet and make the case that we are downstream, we are downwind, and we are very worried about what you're doing in your jurisdiction and the impact it's having on us in our land.
The federal government has been almost non-existent at a policy level. They don't know what's happening in Alberta and we cannot count on them to protect our interests. They are responsible for the water and the land in the Northwest Territories and where are they? They can't even come up with rules and regulations for barges, single-hulled, beat up old barges where 40 million litres of fuel are sitting on one of the most sensitive waterways in our land, with no way to know what's happening, that would not be allowed on land in any stretch of the imagination. They tell us there's nothing we can do and they are responsible. We drink the water, the fish live in it, the marine ecosystems are all relying on that water, so the federal government is not there either. So we have many challenges ahead of us.
There are things we can do in addition to a carbon tax. I believe we should be looking at a new hydro policy that's going to allow us to lay out a plan into the future five, 10, 15 years if we have to, 20, that will say, in the areas where we have hydro, we want to make sure that as a government we use that surplus in all our buildings to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. In those communities that have capacity for hydro, like Whati, we have to come up with a policy and a funding arrangement that does not leave it entirely under the regulatory regime of the PUB, but where we can work with the Tlicho Government, for example, and the people of Whati, and the public, and the GNWT, in a partnership arrangement to look at putting in the small hydro that's going to allow us to deal with some of these issues.
No talk about our budget, our economy, Mr. Speaker, would be complete unless we look at the expenditure side, because we can generate all the revenue, we can double our budget and we would still spend it all, and we would still tell people we need more. That is because, Mr. Speaker, we are spending it as fast or faster than we can make it, and a big chunk of those expenditures come down to how we do business and how people make personal choices.
I want to first talk briefly about the personal choices. I know, having been Health Minister for five years, Education Minister for a bit, that people make choices and that our costs are driven. Sixty-five cents almost of every dollar is spent on social programs. I don't have enough money in the budget to ask the government to say can you chipseal Highway No. 5, because the money is being taken up elsewhere. Every community, every business, every region has a list of issues where they could use the money to do good things. But there's four simple things that are driving our costs. It's the smoking; it's the abuse of alcohol and drugs; it's the lack of a proper diet; and, getting enough exercise. Those four things, Mr. Speaker. As northerners, if we started looking at those, our costs as a government would drop almost overnight. If there was no more alcohol abuse starting today at five o'clock, tomorrow you would notice a difference, and we would notice less pressure on our systems, on our jails, on our family shelters, family violence shelters. We would start having babies born healthy. We would have kids going to school with a full stomach, and awake because the parents were there for them.
So we have a responsibility as we ask and look to generate more revenue. As a government we have to be more effective. We've talked in this House, we've all torn out our hair and gnashed our teeth, for example, about our capital projects that come in consistently over budget, the way they're timed, they way they're estimated and the way they're implemented. As a government, we have a responsibility to change that process so that we do not waste 20, 30, 40 percent of our capital budget on inefficient planning.