Mr. Chairman, my comments would be brief in terms of the budget. I do want to thank the staff members and the Ministers for putting together this budget. I know that the budget process is quite contentious and that the needs are always greater than what we could afford and that priorities have to be considered and sometimes when I have issues that want to be brought forward to see if they can get any attention, sometimes they go in with the mix of other things and sometimes they don’t come out on top or it has to be considered at another time.

Mr. Chairman, the budget here shows an increase of 7.6 percent from 2009-2010. This shows for me a huge increase in terms of our operations. Mr. Chairman, the budget also shows that there are some changes to the sunset within the government.

There are some decisions that need to be made, if we are going to continue funding some of these sunset programs that are not yet being secured through this government in terms of if the federal government would fund these certain programs. They have been funded in the past. That is quite a concern to me in terms of some really good programs that did come out from the sunset programs such as the HELP program. That is a concern to me. How do we continue in this type of funding?

Mr. Chairman, the funding for the TSC, for example, seems to be a department that always seems to be increasing their funding each year. It doesn’t seem that we have any type of control. I would like to see in the future the government can have some discussions as to polling the TSC in line in terms of increasing funding. They have been asking for a few dollars every year that seems to increase to a point where it questions what the increases really are for. I want to say to the Minister in terms of putting this budget together not knowing the certainties of the federal government, I think in the future in terms of revenue that it’s going to be quite challenging for the next couple of years. The programs in the communities are desperately needed and should be continued. Looking at some of the programs, I don’t quite believe that it should be there in terms of some of the funding. There are other basic needs that really need to be looked at, such as health care in our communities, education programs in our communities.

Even the energy initiative programs, Mr. Chair, that seems to be a priority for other communities. However, in the Sahtu region it seems that the energy initiative programs are not given a priority in our region. Just looking at the energy initiatives in areas where there’s lower prices per kilowatt, just on the Energy Initiative, for example, there seems to be a lot of programs or support for communities with very low costs to their energy, the power. It seems like communities such as Good Hope, Deline, Tulita or Colville Lake, even the Wells, they’re not getting that much attention as opposed to other communities like Fort Smith that has a huge number of projects going there to look at the energy efficiency of certain operations there. So I’m not too sure of the consultation or the qualifications for having other communities being considered for these types of projects, because in our communities there’s a high cost of fuel through the barge system, transportation of the fuel, the isolation.

We, as you know, are not on the all-weather road system. I’m very happy with the Ministers who are looking at the construction of the Mackenzie Valley Highway in the Sahtu. We certainly want to look at continued support of the bridging program, which is a lot of money, and we want to look at other infrastructure that would support our communities.

The health program services we see certainly need to be stabilized and we certainly need to look at programs such as the Diabetes Program, programs that need to be run in the communities where support is there for people. There’s certainly an increase in terms of diabetes. The communities are looking forward to seeing how we could have more programs like that in our communities. When you look at operations and maintenance for health services, for example, in Yellowknife you’ll see we have allocated some $2 million for a dementia facility and when you look into the communities where you want to see some basic programs such as health care, dental care, doctor care, we seem to be told that the money is not there and that we have to look elsewhere or we’ll do some other creative solutions to take care of the health of our people.

Mr. Chair, it’s quite disheartening. It’s almost to a point of is the government really concerned about the health of our people in our communities where other regions have, compared to the Sahtu, really good health care in their communities.

So I’ve got some points that I want to point out in the budget with each department and, overall, I want to say that I welcome this budget and hope that there are some changes that could see some benefits to the people in my region that I represent. Mahsi.