Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to thank the Minister of Finance for the budget address there today. There is certainly a lot that can and will be discussed from both within the budget itself and from within the budget address. I am looking forward to those discussions.

I would like to start off right now with just a couple of points. First, I am happy to see that the budget is consistent with our fiscal strategy and that the growth is less than 3 percent minus the net compensation. I think that’s important for the future of this government, both the 16th and future

governments.

I also agree with the Minister’s statement that we need to focus on finding efficiencies and put dollars where they truly will be most effective. I think that is also critical for the future of this and future governments.

I agree that we must seek some creative new ways of doing things that may be outside the box, but I also think it’s important to look within. We have a great number of employees within the Northwest Territories who are highly educated, highly motivated, highly competent and skilled employees who have a lot of these solutions. We need to engage our employees. We need to empower them.

One example of how this government could increase efficiencies would be to actually work with these employees and have them do the work that they were hired to do. I think we spend a lot of time with our employees acting as contract managers where we contract out program design, program evaluation, program implementation. We have employees who can get down into the nitty-gritty and design our programs. We don’t need to keep hiring contractors. I think it’s time to work with our employees and empower them to do this work.

Right now, if you look throughout the government, you can go find bookshelves pretty much everywhere you go. They are full of reports and studies that contractors have done for us. I don’t think many of our employees have ownership or a sense of belonging to those reports because they weren’t involved in the actual design and development. I think if we were to empower our employees, they would have a sense of ownership and a sense of commitment to these policies. We could actually get past planning and get into action.

We can put our action in process and start actually implementing some of these things that need to be implemented.

To the Minister moving forward, work with our employees. Seek out their input. Seek their advice. Get them to do the work. Let’s stop contracting. Let’s spend our money efficiently and effectively.