Mr. Speaker, I’m well aware the Member has serious concerns with process — that’s for the record. I’ve heard him a number of times saying that this government has done things differently from what was done in the past. I’ve been a Member of the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories for 12 years — as a Regular Member, as a Minister and in this present position. Our process we followed to build the budget has been the same process followed by other governments when it’s come about after an election year.

The thing we did differently this time is that we didn’t wait a whole year to try to have an impact on where we’d go as a Legislative Assembly. Members, when the work’s been done by a previous government — pulling information together about forced growth, some new initiatives on that basis of the capital infrastructure plan — it sits there until the new Members become available.

In a typical year, Mr. Speaker, if we decided to try to meet our original timeline of having a whole budget in place by April 1, we would in fact just tinker with the existing work and basically bring in a budget that had lots of work done by a previous Assembly. This government has changed that. That’s why we put in an interim appropriation, status quo budget, no growth, no reduction, until this document comes forward. So that process, that interaction between the government and Regular Members, hasn’t changed.

In fact, I recommended a potential change that didn’t get accepted. So I find it a little surprising to be pushed back, in the sense of saying this government is not doing, and has in fact let down, the process we have in place. The fact is, we’ve looked at our initiatives; we’ve looked at the growth rate; we looked at our revenue sources coming forward. We know we can’t continue at the existing pace, so we set a target of $135 million for reduction and reinvestment. That work is still going on. As you see, we’ve not met the targets, and we’re going to have to look at how we can do that.