Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First to the Minister’s opening remarks. Interest in large capital projects has shifted to the mining sector, which has reduced our influence in the construction market, and inflation has eaten away at our buying power. I think this is a classic case of throwing our hands up and not trying to think of different ways to do things to make our capital dollars go further.
I’d like to see proof, too, that capital project interests have shifted to the mining sector. You know, that’s an easy thing to say. Where is the proof? I’d like to know how much various contractors in the NWT are providing infrastructure to the private sector versus some kind of a graph that shows some of the projects that have been undertaken in the public sector. I mean, it’s fine to say that and it’s fine to talk about inflation. Certainly, there has always been some degree of inflation, but I think we are rolling over too easy on the cost of some of these things.
Not all of them are competitive processes, the Inuvik school as an example. We’ll get into detail later under Education, Culture and Employment and negotiate a contract. Why? Of course, we have a heated construction market south of us in Alberta, but there has got to be a way for this government to continue to encourage competitive processes. If you can’t get companies to take on full contracts for the whole process, then piece it up. Divide it up. Contract it out.
We have so many professionals who work in the department who are engineers. They have a lot of in house capacity, yet we seem like we contract everything out to do with, well, everything
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everything from consulting on what a capital project should look like to what kinds of programs should go in the project. It seems like we contract that out. We have engineers, supervising engineers, with PWS folks.
Why do you hire a project manager with all the credentials of the person you’re going to contract the service to on a capital project? I hope that makes sense. You have people with the same education and experience equivalency that you’re turning around and getting them to supervise the work. I don’t quite understand. I mean, if you want to talk about stretching our capital dollars further….
Anyway, the bottom line is that I think we’re paying too much for our capital projects. I believe in consultation on what these things should look like and what the program’s going to be and the
activities that will take place in them, but I think we’re going there too much with a blank cheque and just letting people dream big and dream wild about this. They’re ending up with running up capital projects that are just too expensive. I can’t categorically prove this to you, but people obtain more for less in the private sector than we do as a government. We have to ask ourselves why. Why is that?
When it comes to the prioritizing what capital will go ahead and what will not, I do think there is tremendous inequity, unfairness, in the way that’s done. I don’t think it’s necessary to put almost the entire year’s capital budget in one community and completely ignore the needs in others. I don’t think there’s equity between large communities and small communities.
I don’t know what the magic formula is to getting capital in your community or in your riding. Obviously, I haven’t stumbled onto that, because most of the big projects in my community have been pushed back — the hospital and the school. I’d hate to hazard a guess that there’s a different table you should be sitting at. At the table I’m sitting at and at this table, I’m always promoting and encouraging and asking and trying to, with all due respect and diplomacy, draw attention to the needs of my community, but then we see projects going ahead like the ones that will be contained. But we’ll get into that in the details.
I don’t know why we as a government also need the Cadillac version of everything. I would like to know what they’re paying for schools in southern Canada
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big schools, fancy schools. I’d like to know how
that compares with what we’re getting on a per square foot basis. I think we’re paying too much.
Another thing that contributes to our costs is the amount that we spend on what we call the soft costs, the engineering and the architectural. Again, I think we walked up to some of these folks with blank cheques in our hand, and the sky is the limit. We keep talking about the competing interest for capital. If that’s truly the case, then we need to look at every area that we can economize.
Going forward after capital projects are built, it would be really nice in the design and planning of these if we would take some of the ongoing O&M costs into consideration too. I haven’t been fully convinced that the whole energy conservation thing has actually hit home with some of these projects yet. I think we’ve seen a tremendous increase in the cost of utilities and will continue to. There must be ways of building more energy efficiencies into these buildings. I’d be very interested in hearing from the Minister what kind of emphasis is put on that when all of this consultation and program review goes into these projects.
Even when you apply a factor of costs for remote and rural locations, all those kinds of things, I still think we are paying an extraordinary amount for our capital projects here in the North. I again would be interested in seeing, on a square foot basis, what kind of a rate we’re paying compared to similar infrastructure that is built in southern Canada.
I think the process has improved. I do support this new timing. I think there is still a lot we could gain by consulting with people in the industry. We’ve been talking about that, and I understand that maybe there’s a paper or a report in the works right now with the NWT Construction Association. I think we need to view them as our partners in this discussion and lay it on the table that we have a lot of demands on our capital, a lot of needs. We need to work with them. Northern industry wants to see benefit from the money that our government spends. We want northern preference. I think we need to talk to them about what we can do as a government to get as much as we can for the dollars we have.
I think they are willing to talk to us about that. I’ll be very interested in hearing what they have to say. It has been on our agenda for a long time, to meet with those folks. That is about all I have to say right now in the general comments. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.