Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As I said on Friday, I would have a few more comments to go through the opening address and highlight. Mr. Chairman, as I said on Friday, I am very supportive of working towards making our communities more sustainable through environmental investment, but one of the things that I find to date, we still have to realize that we need to find real savings for our cost of living issue. We continue to invest in cost of living initiatives but, as I said on Friday, several businesses all in the end say costs keep increasing. You go to anyone’s power bill, the power bill keeps increasing. The oil bill keeps increasing. Of course, the cost of living makes it very unbearable to live here. I suspect that that is going to be one of the most significant emerging issues going into the next election for this Legislature which is, what has this government done to lower the cost of living? Although there continues to be good investment stewardship and, if anything, as I have said before, I think that may end up being one of the incidental hallmarks of this Legislature where it will be known for is a very green Legislature. It has taken on very positive initiatives to recognize its responsibility and role in the future. But setting that aside, what have we

done to address the cost of living? I think ultimately what we keep coming back to is nothing has changed. We just keep shuffling costs around and the cost of living here continues to grow.

Mr. Chairman, although I was listening very closely to the last speaker, I am glad to see we had no tax increases coming forward in this budget. I think that our economy has taken enough of a beating in the last year and I have said before that our corporate taxes will have a difficult time keeping up with our government’s need for spending. I have often said that, and I really do believe this, that we don’t necessarily have a revenue problem, we just have a spending problem. I would often look with high hopes to the program review office that it would find ways to tackle some of our larger spending. If I could take that further, I wish the program review office is more engaging with Members specific to where would we believe an initiative should be targeted and focused in on saving money. I think it is a real policy question on how we fund our programs and see our future. I think there needs to be more value put into that.

There are a couple of other areas that I would like to highlight. Certainly investments in children, youth and families is one. Something that I have heard this summer when I was doing some door knocking is that different people in the constituency talked about junior kindergarten and pre-kindergarten and noticing that it seems to be an emergence on some of the latest trends of what people are having as an expectation of where should education go and how should it be reflected. Long has passed the day where people sort of drop their kids off to someone who provides a day home and probably a very loving day home that is safe and secure, but the parents are starting to demand things such as a little earlier child education than what is being offered out there in an organized sense. I think their expectations are growing. The modern parent these days does not believe that parking your small child in front of the TV calling that day home child care management. A number of constituents have told me that they would like to see some organization evolve into that sort of area. It is not a simple answer. It is just to say now we are going to add junior kindergarten to all schools throughout the Territory. It is not an easy thing. With those things come costs as well as priorities, but it is an emerging issue that I think our government should start examining about what fruits of our labour will deliver positive results.

It is nice that we spend money on tons of programs. We can be here all day talking about them, but ultimately I hear it constantly everywhere I go. Education is the best employment program we have. We should start investing in it as soon as possible. A number of parents have talked to me about on the horizon they would like to see our government start addressing these issues as a

future initiative. I don’t think that there is a case where people would assume that it would be there… They ask for it today and it would be there for the next education season for the school year that is, but yet I think it is an emerging issue. People would like to see that the government is focusing in on that direction.

Under stabilizing the health care system, I would like to congratulate the government on moving forward on the downtown clinic in Yellowknife here. I think it will have a significant benefit in a few areas. The first is obviously cost. Rather than having multiple leases throughout other buildings, the government will be able to help focus some of its financial resources into a particular area and, furthermore, doctors will be able to provide more walk-in services for patients. The coordination of those services would probably be a major factor. It would bring the administration of those separate offices together and we augment that with the new benefits of being able to do X-rays there and tests. I think it will be a huge step forward for health services here in this community. I think, in the long term, it will provide excellent value for what we are getting.

I think that is a bold step forward in the way the government has been doing business in the past. I certainly hope this will sort of drive out a model that should be expanded upon for other types of thinking. How can we consolidate services in a manner that makes sense in a particular community? When I emphasize consolidate, I don’t necessarily mean for the community community. I mean within a community to make sure that we are getting good value for money. As I was complaining the other day about my concerns about local housing and moving the housing program back to the housing LHOs, what we have done is stepped away from a service centre or one-stop shop. I think initiatives like that shouldn’t be frowned upon. We should be finding ways to do better business from a service centre of excellence point of view.

To continue under the health file per se, although it is not related to health directly, it is the housing for disabled people. In our community under the LHOs, we don’t have stock of housing or an available stock for people when it comes to families. I know one particular family had been trying to get into housing for some time now and because of the disability, it is easy to find… Their response to me was it is easy for the housing authority to find a place for them to stay, but then it gets into a problem about is it a place that is of quality whereas it is safe. It is built with a person who has a disability in mind. With the aging population wanting to grow a little older and still be a little bit more dependent on their own rather than being put into a sort of centralized institution type service. People want to be able to be independent as long as possible.

But when it comes to family services out there, they are very few and far between. In one particular case now, I think we are paying well in excess of what can be considered a normal market rate in order to house somebody properly. Our housing program by itself, compartmentalizing that point and pushing it aside for a second, is not focused in on enough about trying to get people out onto their own feet, sort of the old helping hand approach. That is one of the big focuses, I think, that is now being hurt by separating the housing component out of the income support, as service centres continue to strive to get people to work harder and to stand up on their own and take advantage of the opportunities before them. Mr. Chairman, I think moving housing back to the local housing authorities was a step backwards.

Mr. Chairman, the big thing that as we all came into this Assembly, we talked about was the big thing that is coming forward on everyone’s mind at the time were things like environment. I want to emphasize that I think the territorial government’s focus is in the right direction, but we always have to keep cost of living in mind. Although we are going to spend a fair bit of money to continue expanding projects, I just want to end on the point that we still have to always keep the fact that the bottom line is always going to matter more than anything else.

We don’t have to look too far than our southern states, that is the United States of course, and see that when people have a choice, they certainly like to do the good stewardship process, but when people’s backs are against the wall, when it comes to being able to put food on the table, they tend to choose the economy over the environment, which, you know, up front is a mistake and over the long term it will be a mistake, but people are forced to do what they need to do. So I would exercise caution to this government by saying the more competitive we can be, the easier it is for people to live here under the conditions that we do survive under, whether it is heating your home or putting food on your table. I mean, those are very important issues and although we would like to do things constantly better, those are primary issues on people’s minds. So, Mr. Chairman, for my opening comments, I will leave it there and, of course, with anything else, I will have questions during page-by-page review. Thank you.