Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I may sound like a broken record, but I’m going to state this again for the record. There are a couple of items in here that it seems on an annual basis cause the Government of the Northwest Territories some trouble when it comes to budgeting.
The first one is the special warrant for $6.012 million approved on June 29th . How we budget for
fire suppression in our territory has been an issue going back over the eight years that I’ve been here. I don’t think we budget enough. Obviously, in the past few years we’ve come back for substantially more money than what is budgeted. I don’t understand, either, why a special warrant would have to be issued halfway through the summer. Obviously, fires don’t stop at the end of June and they continue on into August, and maybe we should take a final tally and clean it all up with one move instead of just doing one halfway through the summer. It doesn’t make a lot of sense on how that happens. Again, I think we really need to examine how we budget for forest fire suppression in our territory.
Like I said, it’s overdue that we look for more money in this area instead of going to special warrant and supplementary appropriations whenever necessary because of certainly an underfunded amount of money in the Department of ENR. I’d be supportive of us trying to find some more money and budget that more appropriately.
The second item that I’m going to just speak briefly about -- I know Members have heard me talk about this time and time again over the past eight years – is how we budget the health authorities across the Northwest Territories has been an issue not only for the current Minister of Health and Social Services, the Minister of Finance happens to be the same guy, the government. We really need to come up
with a game plan on governance and how the scarce health dollars are spent in our territory. I don’t think we can continue to allow these huge deficits to run up in some authorities and then try to take money from other authorities and move it around. It’s basically just a shell game. It’s not a permanent solution.
The concern at Stanton obviously is that it’s underfunded. It has been for the past years I’ve been here. We need to come up with a more permanent fix to this instead of just throwing millions of dollars at it whenever we see fit, or have a few extra dollars, or taking money from other authorities and moving it to authorities that require an influx of cash. It’s not the way a government should be budgeting. It’s not conducive to good government. It’s a practice that I think we should try to minimize whenever we can.
Again, a permanent fix. I’ve said it before, I’ve been critical of this, we have to come up with a new way to govern health care in the Northwest Territories. Have regional management boards but take the budgeting and dollars that we have and have it under one roof instead of all these authorities across the territory with some running surpluses and some running deficits. I think, from a human resource perspective, we’d also see some savings in that area as well. I just continue to be disappointed that the government isn’t trying to come up with more of a permanent fix on health care. It’s going to become even more of an important issue as we move forward, and the strains and demands that are going to be placed on our health care system grow. We don’t have the dollars to deal with that, so we have to ensure that, like I said, every dollar we spend is going to be spent effectively and authorities are going to be budgeted the way they should. We need to come up with a new way forward and this certainly isn’t it.