Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Bill 8 here at third reading. I listened quite intently to the words of my colleagues, and I appreciate all of their words. I know Mr. Abernethy put a great deal of work into his remarks, and I appreciate those. I echo a lot of his sentiments and those of other Members.
I guess I stand here today…. Four weeks ago —and four weeks goes by pretty quick in this line of work; although it seemed like an eternity at times, it did go by fairly quick — I voted against the budget at second reading, and I did so out of principle. As many of you know, I’m a process guy, and I honestly believe the process was flawed. I don’t believe Members were given an opportunity to have input into the budget to the extent that I would expect in a consensus government.
What it took, Mr. Speaker, was the 11 Regular Members working with their Cabinet colleagues, over the past three and a half weeks, to come up with something that we could live with. Is it perfect? No, it’s not. Has the process been flawed? Yes, it has. It hasn’t been perfect, but we need to move ahead. We need to get on with things. We need to learn something. We need to grow as Members and as an Assembly.
I think we can take a lot out of the last three and a half weeks. We’ve had some lively debates in this House; we tried to keep things on an issue level. From my standpoint, it never did get personal; it’s all about the issues. I respect the Premier — as the Premier and as the Finance Minister — and the work that he and his Cabinet colleagues have done over the past three and a half weeks in getting the budget to the state it is in today, and that’s at third reading. I think a lot of good work has been done by the Members of this House, and everybody’s to be applauded for working together and showing the patience to see this through. It would have been easy for us to vote it down in second reading. But as my colleague Mr. Beaulieu stated, we would have started back at square one, and I don’t think that was something we wanted to do.
What I believe is the government took on too much too soon. It’s a government still trying to find its legs. I can appreciate some of the growing pains of a new government just coming in and wanting to do so much, and I give Premier Roland a lot of credit for his ambitious start and trying to get some things done and a new way of doing business. I subscribe to a lot of that, Premier Roland and Members. I believe fully in trying to do the best we can with what we have. That’s where I believe we can all work together and achieve some good things over the next three and half years, the time that we have left here together.
Moving ahead, though, I do believe we need to come up with a road map of some kind: something that we can share with the public, we can share with each other, we can share with our stakeholders. Something that’s going to show us going from where we’re at today to the time the next election comes around and the 17th Legislative
Assembly of the Northwest Territories is voted into office three and a half years from now. We have to
come up with something like that. We can gauge our progress and our success on that road map. It has to happen.
One of the key failings, I think, in all of this, was communication. That’s been flawed from the start. Whose responsibility is that? I’m not sure. Again, I think it’s just the way things happened. We were trying to get too ambitious too soon.
Our budget has grown 30 per cent in the last five years. That’s a tremendous rate of growth. It’s over $1.3 billion now. We do need to find ways, and a means, of getting our spending in check. One of the things in the process that we’ve set out for ourselves…. I buy into the fact we’ve got to reduce our spending, but as fast as we reduce our spending, we’re finding new places to spend the money.
Some of this, going forward, has to be in an effort to cut back on our spending. We can’t spend every dollar that we reduce ourselves by. We can’t find more ways to spend it, because it’s a tremendous…. Thirty per cent in five years: that’s a tremendous rate of expenditure growth, and it’s something that we just can’t sustain. I know the Finance Minister has said that himself. Again, I think we have to have our eyes squarely on the future, and we need to work together to get there.
Before I close, again I want to say it’s been a struggle at times. But I believe with the back-and-forth that has happened in at least the past week…. I really do appreciate the work Cabinet Ministers have shown this side of the House, and I’ll point out Mr. Miltenberger specifically, and Mr. McLeod, for their efforts to work with committee, and Premier Roland, at the end of the day, stepping up to the plate. Mahsi.
Applause.
What we see here today, again, is not perfect, but it’s something that I can lend my support to and take it out to my constituents.
The job loss has been minimized, so I think that’s a key thing too. In all of this the job loss has been minimized. Again, with that, thank you very much.