I thank the Minister for that. I agree with what he’s saying. I wasn’t a Member of the Legislative Assembly during the life of the 14th Legislative Assembly when North Slave Correctional Centre was built, but that building and the young offenders unit that joins it were built at millions and millions of dollars. I forget the final

figure. It was probably $20 million over budget, maybe even more.

You would think that as a government we would learn a thing or two along the way. When you go to a construction method that allows designs to change on the fly, it’s going to cost you money. So why wouldn’t we know exactly what we want and exactly how it’s going to be built, get the design etched in stone, and then go out and get it built? What we allow ourselves to do is this design-build, and then things get all muddy; the design changes and the scope changes, and it costs us nothing but money. On large capital projects we can’t just continue to allow so many people…. They say too many cooks in the kitchen, and that’s what’s happening. That’s what’s costing us lots of money.

I know the Minister and the deputy minister are alive to these concerns as we’re going through the change in the capital acquisition planning process and everything. These are legitimate concerns. We oftentimes, too, just spec buildings out to the nth degree. We get the best of the best all the time. I’ve heard that from a number of contractors around the territory. When the government goes out and looks for a contractor to build something, it’s spec’d…. A good example is the Combined Services Building at YZF. It’s spec’d to the teeth. Some schools that have been built recently have lights in them that are ten times the cost of a regular light that would go in a classroom. We always seem to go for the best of the best. What we really need to keep an eye on is the functionality and usefulness of the facilities that we are building in any community across the territory.

We have to get the most out of our capital dollars that we can, and right now I don’t think we are. This Inuvik schools project is just another example of us bleeding money away when we don’t really need to. We need to get some schools built. That’s the bottom line. We just seem to keep spinning our tires, and it takes too long, Mr. Chairman.

I’ve got great concerns, especially on the larger capital projects, that we don’t seem to learn our lesson. History is going to repeat itself again.