Thank you, Mr. Chair. I wanted to ask the Minister and make some comments to item 2 in his opening remarks with regard to the $3.1 million that are costs associated with the collective agreement between the government and the NWTTA — the Northwest Territories Teachers’ Association.
It goes to, I guess, the way we do our budgets and our estimates. I have difficulty in understanding how, when we did our budgets for ’08–09, we didn’t anticipate that there would be some sort of increase for costs associated with this particular agreement between the government and the NWTTA. At that point we would have been in bargaining, I’m sure, and there would have been an expectation that we could make an estimate as to what the results of the bargaining would be.
I guess I have a difficulty where we are asking in a supplementary appropriation to approve an expense that I think ought to have been foreseen and which, in my estimation, ought to have been included in the main budget. My understanding when we passed the ’08–09 budget, not so long ago it seems, was that we were going to be seeing fewer and fewer supplementary appropriations and that they should be basically for unforeseen expenses. I don’t consider this particular item to be an unforeseen expense.
Kind of hand in hand with this particular expense is the effect this particular supplementary appropriation is going to have on our supplementary reserve. Again, it was my understanding that the departments were given a portion of the $25 million supplementary reserve to carry them through expenses that they didn’t necessarily anticipate and to give them bit of leeway in their department budgets. With this particular appropriation it looks to me as though we
are going to be left with a supplementary reserve of some $3 million out of approximately $15 million, I think, initially.
I am concerned that a $3 million hit for an NWTTA collective agreement on a supplementary reserve that was already reduced because we were giving funding to the department so they wouldn’t have to come back and ask for more money is not the way we should be going. I would like to perhaps get some comment from the Minister on why we budget this way and if we couldn’t conceivably consider doing it in a different way.