Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To the motion. I’ll be supporting this motion. I think that this particular project, coming up the way it did with no substantiation, no compelling reason why this needs to be built, is just another example of this government’s pathetic planning.
I guess it pays to be the Premier, you know? I guess $150 million in your home community when other communities are getting nothing…. And you come up with lame reasons to push back capital in other people’s communities in another region. We find pathetic reasons to push it back. But, boy, bring a $21 million project on the books here, and just push it through. No substantiation. No market analysis. And the Premier can sit over there and laugh and talk because, you know, they’ve got the numbers. So it’s just the timing.
You know, nothing’s going to change. There’s going to be no harm. There’s going to be nothing lost by doing due diligence on this project, by doing the analysis, by bringing the information forward in the proper way the Members are asking for. But if this is the kind of high handed way this government wants to operate, if they can get the support of Members, then I guess that’s just the way it is.
I agree with Mr. Krutko. It’s a sad day when we have to go and explain in all of our communities
why capital has to be pushed back and there’s nothing going on and people are living as though in Third World countries, in some instances, and schools where you can’t even have proper washrooms. Let’s pile $150 million into Inuvik all at the same time. I mean, the hotels will be overfull; the restaurants will be overfull; the tradespeople will be, you know — talk about our support for local labour. You can be guaranteed to build all of this in Inuvik at the same we’re going to have to import a whole lot of people from other places in order to get this work done.
There’s nothing lost in deferring it until we get the proper…. Why this project? Why ram it through? You know, the government’s lack of planning should not constitute an emergency on our part. It’s no emergency for me. Anyway, it’s a sad day in the Northwest Territories, like Mr. Krutko said, when we’re laying people off because we’ve got no money, but we’re going to put a high priority on some people because the office building they’re in is old. I still haven’t heard any safety or health issues being raised on this particular thing.
You know, it’s a sad day when we turn teachers out of the Northwest Territories because they’ve got no place to live. Oh, heaven forbid that we should spend a little bit of money building some staff housing, because we got out of staff housing. That was the wisdom of the day. We got out of staff housing, and now we’ve got small communities struggling with keeping nurses and keeping teachers in their communities, because this government can’t see its way clear to spend a few million dollars to build some housing to keep professionals in the small communities. But we’ve got $21 million for an office building in Inuvik that wasn’t on the books, that just sprang on to the capital plan, a pathetic example of planning by this government. They should do their homework. They should go back to the drawing board. They should do their analysis. They should come here with their compelling arguments, and they should substantiate this to us.
I cannot support this with this lack of information. If we’re going to do our capital planning this way, if this is how we’re going to allocate capital funds, well, I guess it just goes to the quality of the government that we actually have, which is getting pretty low. Thank you.