Mr. Speaker, I rise once again today to speak on the closure of the Arctic Tern young female facility in Inuvik. The Department of Justice has given us many reasons for the closure of Arctic Tern. Frankly, I don’t believe any of them. I think the department used the budget reduction as an opportunity and an excuse to get rid of a facility that was always in the crosshairs.
Surely, Mr. Speaker, when the facility was built six years ago at a cost of around $14 million, the department had to have had some idea that the Youth Criminal Justice Act of Canada was going to change. This, in my opinion, is poor planning and not a good use of government money. They say the facility is underutilized. First of all, that should be a good thing — fewer young girls incarcerated. When you build a school for 500 students and you have 200 to 300 students, is that considered underutilized, and is that an opportunity to close the school?
There are many ways for this government to realize savings and staff reductions. Has anyone asked the employees of Arctic Tern, or the public service for that matter, how best to save the GNWT money? A way you can know how to save money is to ask the public in all 33 communities, and they’ll give you fine examples of government money that is poorly spent. I would encourage all residents of the Northwest Territories to e-mail us and give us your views and opinions on how to save money, and we can use that in our deliberations with Cabinet.
Mr. Speaker, I am not a critical or a disruptive person by nature. I try to look at everything from a common sense point of view, and common sense in this case tells me that more thought should have been put into this budget, more consultations with the Regular MLAs and, most importantly, consultations with the people around the Northwest Territories who have to live with the reductions without really having any sort of genuine input or opinions into the budget. These people are why we are here, and we should never overlook the importance of their views. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: this budget has all the markings of a bureaucratic budget and not a people’s budget.