Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Oral questions. The honourable Member for Great Slave, Mr. Abernethy.

My question today is to the Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, and it is related to my Member’s statement yesterday concerning federal responsibility for Indian and Inuit health care costs.

The federal government has limited growth on their portion of the Indian and Inuit health care at around 2 per cent. Real growth in health care is around 7 per cent or more. As a result, the GNWT is falling further behind. The feds owe our health system more money to support our health care system — around $95 million to date.

So my questions are: what is Health and Social Services doing to collect these outstanding dollars? What is the status of any negotiations that are going on between the department and the federal government? How long can we wait, or expect, or.... How long is it going to take before we develop some sort of funding model to flow a larger portion of funds to us so that we’re not relying on the 2 per cent?

Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Ms. Lee.

Mr. Speaker, I can advise the Member that this definitely is an issue that is on top of our agenda, not only for myself, as the Minister, but for the Cabinet as a whole. The Premier has brought this issue up in all of his meetings with the Prime Minister and the Minister of DIAND. I am working on meeting with the Minister of Health, the

Hon. Clement, as soon as we can arrange a meeting to speak about this in person. I also need to clarify that the issue here is about a gap between the funding that we get from the federal government for our aboriginal peoples, but it’s really not an outstanding bill where it’s about just collecting it. It’s a disagreement, and it’s a dispute. It’s a gap, because the federal government placed a cap. They put a cap on it, and we need to renegotiate that.

So I think it’s really important for the Members to know that we need to renegotiate it. It’s not a matter of sending an invoice and collecting the money and actions that we need to do that. There’s a lot more complexity to this, and we have been spending lots of energy on it.

I do understand that it is a gap. I understand that right now their increased costs are based on around 2 per cent, and we know that the real costs of health care are increasing about 7 per cent or more a year. I understand that.

The gap is real. You need to find a way to renegotiate that cap that they have placed on you. So I’m once again going to ask: what kind of timeline are you working on to develop or increase that cap, or negotiate an increase to the cap, so that we can stop losing money that they clearly owe us?

From our point of view, our timeline is as soon as possible, but obviously, there are lots of parties involved. Not only is it the federal government, but all the other governments that fall under this agreement. It is an agreement that we need to open up and renegotiate. We have asked for that negotiation to happen. We have not heard back yet.

So timeline.... We will work on that as much as possible, because it is a crucial issue. We are looking at all options available to the government, to see what additional pressure and stress we could put on this so we could come to a resolution. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Oral questions. The honourable Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance and the Premier. Again, because of communications or lack of same, our public has been left trying to sort of work by Braille, if you will, to figure out on what basis this government has made projections that put us into deficit a couple years or three years into our term here. This has obviously cost the public and non-government organizations, volunteer groups, a lot of resources as they try and solve this mystery.

Will the Premier commit to immediately providing the public, who are our partners and our clients, with full information that clarifies the basis on which these projections were made, and provide the sources of the information? I know the government has chosen to flip back and forth to suit their needs between the Main Estimates and the Main Estimates as revised, so I’d like that to be clear and provided immediately to the public, so that they can give us the feedback we need and are responsible to bring to this House.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Mr. Roland.

Mr. Speaker, we have provided, in tabling the documents…. It’s the first time we’ve tabled this set of documents so that they’re available for public review. The Budget Address, as well, has a lot of information on the stats and where we’ve come from. It’s not a myth out there. We’ve had to build on.... Based on our assumptions and knowing that our formula financing going forward is fixed — there’s little adjustment to that, and our growth of expenditures is there — we’re going to run into problems. So we have to take action now, before we end up in a situation where all our flexibility is gone.

During good times we should be planning and making sure we don’t end up in bad times. So we’ve had to take the steps to limit our growth or manage our growth, which means there are some changes, and reinvest some of those dollars into priority areas. We’ve got lots of information here that’s available to the public. If there’s specific questions, as we go through each department, more detail will be made available through Members’ questions to Ministers and their deputies and senior staff here. That is available to the public as well.

Mr. Speaker, I acknowledge I’ve had some remarks from the Premier. I also acknowledge that there’s tons of information out there — big thick documents. Certainly the Budget Address I find very murky. It basically talked about the top 6 or 8 per cent of the budget. I’m asking the Premier: will he provide the public with exactly the information on which the projections were based — the graph and the sources of it, the tables that show the decline in revenue and the sources of the decline in revenue and so on, the exact basis? In science, conclusions are not acknowledged until they're duplicable. To this date there is no duplicability, if you will — oh my gosh, the Hansard...

Laughter.

...to this projection. So I ask the same question again.

Mr. Speaker, as we have in past, as governments have practised, part of the Budget Address is a document on the future, the

fiscal forecasting, the fiscal strategy that’s been put in place. In fact, the fiscal strategy is outlined in the document that was tabled, part of the address that’s available to the public. In the back section under B-3, it shows in the graphs that if we don’t make any changes, that’s where we would end up. Those are based on the information we have available right now through our formula financing, with our agreement with the federal government, our own-source revenues, and estimates are made.

We also have to mention that science says we come from monkeys.

I have to say, going back to some of the remarks I’ve heard from the Minister and the Premier.... I don’t, of course, debate the need to live within our means and so on. That’s not what this is about. This is about clarity and communication.

The public has gone to hire economists from afar to try and make sense of this murkiness, and it’s still not clear. Somehow there seems to be a gap between the Premier’s understanding of the situation and the public’s. Will the Premier address this gap and make it plain?

If the Member is talking about the Parkland report, that’s one thing — hired by the unions in the Northwest Territories to look at our numbers, come up with their assumptions and present those, in a sense, to question where we’ve come from as a government. I disputed those numbers. As the Member stated, we can both — the government and people out there — look at numbers, put them on a scale and say things are actually quite good.

Talk about the surplus. The surplus is a planned surplus so we can fund our capital programs. I’ve been saying that for years and I continue to say it. We need that surplus to help us with our capital programs. That surplus comes from O&M expenditures we spend on an annual basis.

So if there are avenues to put more clarity out there, that’s one thing. I believe, for example, it started — and I think it’s a good process — with Members having a pre-budget consultation process. We are taking that advice in our work, as well, and I think that’s another avenue we can use in doing that. We’ve got lots of information here now that’s available. We’ve got all the detail in here now that they can have a look at. Once they have specific questions on those areas, we’ll try to address them.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Oral questions. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko.

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Minister of Transportation, Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Since 1995–1996 and 2004–2005, this department has been working with the community of Aklavik on the ATV community access road project. In 2001 the community of Aklavik requested that the department relook at the ATV trail and convert it into an all-weather road to the source that Mr. Krutko made reference to, at Willow River.

This department has been listening to the community of Aklavik and the communities down the Mackenzie Valley. We have spent $309,000 on this access road now that’s been determined.

We are committed to building partnerships with industry at the level of government, such as mentioned yesterday by the Finance Minister, and some of the partnerships are going under the Building Canada Fund.

We are very much interested in going back into Aklavik, relooking at the request, and sitting down with the community. The Member and I had some discussions on when we could get into Aklavik and

have a community discussion in terms of what can we do to look at their needs. We also need to talk with the community in terms of their gravel sources, as to who does this. We've stated that they're now responsible for such projects as gravel sources. It will be coming up in our discussions with my officials. We are prepared to go in to the Member’s riding.

Mr.

Speaker, the Minister was

nowhere even close to answering my question. My question was: what does the community have to do to get on the list of projects that are going to be funded through the federal government, through the Building Canada Fund, the strategic initiative investment fund?

Nowhere on this list do I see any communities that are not in Ministers’ ridings, for one thing.

Interjections.

I’d like to ask the Minister: what do you have to do to get on the list that we’ve been sending to the federal government? We don’t have input from this side of the House?

Mr. Speaker, we have to go through a process. The other projects have gone through a process.

The community of Aklavik is again asking for an issue that.... This project in Aklavik is something that we have to look at very seriously. We have to do some engineering; we have to do some studies. We do it every year, as we go through our lists.

The project we identified is somewhere in the Building Canada Fund, in terms of our research and development initiatives, but we have to do some work there.

So we are continuing to work with the community of Aklavik, going forward on a yearly basis. We’ll have to have some more discussions with the community and the Member. And from there, we will take it as to what are the priorities of the Government of the Northwest Territories, in terms of investments in our infrastructures.

Mr. Speaker, I will try to make it as simple as I can. There was a list submitted to the federal government on projects from this government. We as Ordinary Members have not had an opportunity to put items on that list, but yet, through the strategic committees that are set up on the other side, they had that discussion internally. There was a list sent to Ottawa in regard to projects they wanted to see, on that side of the House, but nowhere on that list is reference to a project that I would like to see on it.

I’d like to ask the Minister: when will the Members on this side of the House have an opportunity to put on that list projects that have been in the books going back to 1991? All we are doing is talking

about this project. When are we going to really see the reality of something happening here?

Mr.

Speaker, let’s be

very clear. We had the list, which we put together. We met with the committees. We’ve talked about the review on a yearly basis. We’ll come back again to have some further discussions.

I have mentioned to the Member that under research and development and the Building Canada Fund — the portion that we will take from the funding there — we will look at the Aklavik gravel source and other projects. We have to look at investment right down the Mackenzie Valley for people in the Beaufort-Delta or the Gwich’in area.

The department has invested heavily into the Member’s riding. The Aklavik gravel source is up there, and he’s been talking to me. It’s going to be something that I’ll have further discussions on with him and the community members when we provide another list that is scheduled to be submitted to the federal government.