Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Every Government of the Northwest Territories when taking office is faced with severe implications. I’ve been a Member of the Legislative Assembly for four terms and I think right at the start of my term we talked of debt walls. We’ve always avoided them by taking the right fiscal strategy and managed to keep the government in a place that keeps ourselves moving along.

The Member has talked about unrealistic expectations. The expectations that are presented

are presented on a fiscal strategy that Mr. Miltenberger presented in his budget that the Members of the Assembly had a chance to review and passed in this Assembly. So to now call them unrealistic, I did not hear that being mentioned to Mr. Miltenberger in that way.

Yes, there are real implications here. If things are to go totally off the rails, if we had another catastrophe, right now all our capital projects are on our books, accounted for, moving ahead as they typically would. This is the one project that was outside of our system. We don’t have another one that’s outside the system in that area. We feel we have a fix in place going forward specifically to this project that’s before us. As to the other fiscal strategies, the Minister will have to come back in his business planning process, as he does annually, to deal with that.

The other one is the fiscal strategy is set with the support of Members. So if things need to change he would have to gain that support. At times, for example as Mr. Miltenberger went out with possible tax initiatives to see if there was new revenue that could be sought. After seeking public input and input from the business community and the downturn of the economy it was felt this was not the appropriate time. We would have to continue to weigh those options as we go forward. So with future governments of the Northwest Territories either you increase your revenues or you decrease your expenditures. We took the road of trying to reduce our expenditures to allow us some more flexibility and we have gained that flexibility. Now, with this Deh Cho Bridge Project coming onto the books, if approved by Members we’ll be able to manage this through and as presented by the Department of Finance with the borrowing capacity extended to us by the federal government project specific. We’ll be able to manage our way through this one as well.

Some used to say, every government would say we’ve always talked about this proverbial debt wall that we never seem to get impacted on. That’s because the fiscal strategies at the time presented helped us stay off that debt wall and we continue to present those scenarios to Members as we go forward. We fully recognize that there are severe potential future impacts if things were to not go this way. If the federal government was not to work with us, if the Members of the Assembly said no to this bill, there would be immediate fiscal impacts. There would be immediate impact to capital projects and there would be immediate impact to O and M. We believe we have found a way to manage through this so that’s not the case.

I’m hoping that Members will see that we manage to always stay off the debt wall by the fiscal strategy. We have put an action plan in place that would see this and we’ve had to adopt one for this

we feel will keep us whole in the 16th Legislative

Assembly. It will provide the 17th Legislative

Assembly as they start out with the flexibility they will need. That aside, the next Assembly will have to adopt their fiscal strategy going forward.