Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a number of comments. I’m kind of jumping around here but I’ll lay them out. I don’t have a lot of questions but I do have a lot of comments.
I’d like to also speak to the Inuvik-Tuk highway. I appreciate that it is a priority of this government and that we are putting some funding into it, and I know that the federal government has allocated some $150 million towards the project. Knowing that our debt limit is what it is and knowing the amount of borrowing – I should say our borrowing limit, not our debt limit – is where it is in the amount of borrowing that we currently have on the books and that we have to account for, it leaves us very little room to put any serious money into the Inuvik-Tuk highway project. I know that there has been some suggestion that we may be able to access the federal funding first and then when our borrowing limit and the gap of our borrowing and the limit has been eased somewhat, we could maybe access our own funds later on. That would be a question to the Minister: Is that something that the department is considering? Is it something that’s feasible that we could use the federal money, say, in the first two or three years, and then use our own money after that, so that would give us a little breathing room and enable us to move ahead on that project?
I am disappointed. I haven’t totally examined the budget yet, but I believe there’s very limited money in here for schools. I think the Minister says $11 million for school replacements and renovations. My belief is that it probably is $11 million going towards projects which are already in the works. The Inuvik school is not yet finished and I can’t remember what other schools we have on the go. There are several school projects which are already in progress and which need to be finished. I don’t believe there is any new money in the budget to address the needs of Yellowknife schools. I speak specifically of Sissons School and Mildred Hall School here in Yellowknife. There’s no funding to do the necessary…to finish the renovations at
Mildred Hall and to do the much-needed renovations at Sissons School. I recognize that we don’t have a lot of room to add new projects in this particular budget year, but I’d like to serve notice that for sure Sissons is a school which is desperately in need of renovations and I’d like to see it on the capital plan, at least see it as a projected project within the life of this Assembly, because the school really shouldn’t be waiting much longer than it already has.
I am pleased to see the emphasis on small capital in the budget. I don’t know if the number is larger than it was in the previous capital budget, but I think it probably has increased somewhat and I think that’s a good thing. Particularly in the area of health, I remember from the previous Assembly that Health specifically spoke to us about the need for investment in small capital. They have huge amounts of technology that needs to be upgraded and updated all the time. I would hope that the amount of money that we have in small capital is going to address some of those urgent needs of the Health department.
I want to also commend whoever developed our document. The substantiation sheets are, in my mind, wonderful. They’re extremely thorough. I can’t say that I’ve read every one of them, but certainly if I had a question about a project, I could go to that substantiation sheet for that project and it pretty much told me everything I needed to know. I’d like to commend the Minister and staff for changing our process a little bit and for providing that background information to Members, because it certainly makes it easier to figure out what things we’re talking about and the background on them and gives us a lot more information.
I have a bit of a concern with ongoing needs in our communities. I know the Minister, in his opening remarks, mentioned there’s $28 million to fund community government, and I think he said earlier on in his statement that we are providing a stable source of funding for community governments. I agree that it’s stable, but I can’t agree that $28 million is addressing the needs of our community governments. I don’t know the amount but I know that the infrastructure needs of our community governments are huge, and I believe the funding we provide them and that they can get even through gas tax money and any other sources of funding other than GNWT funds only addresses some 60 percent of their community infrastructure needs. In my mind, we need to be well aware of the fact that, yes, we’re giving them a stable source of funding, and perhaps this year there’s no increase but we have to seriously consider increasing the amount of money we give to our communities for infrastructure, and not in five years’ time but in one year’s time.
I’m really pleased to see that there is a planning study for the Stanton Territorial Hospital. That’s a project which has been talked about for probably 10 years and a little more positively in the last couple of years, but there’s been no action on it and it’s a facility, as well, that desperately needs renovations and upgrading. It needs to be brought into the 21
st Century, so to speak. I’m hoping that the planning will be done with all haste and that we can actually get some construction and design money into the budget next year and get started on this project. I’m not quite sure how we’re going to be able to fund it. The Minister has said previously that it’s a $400 million project. That may be a little high, but it’s still going to be many millions of dollars. But with the planning study done, we know what we need in order to get the project off the ground, and I think we can then start to try and find creative ways to fund it; creative but legal, by the way.
I am disappointed that there’s no money for Highway No. 7. I have to support my colleague Mr. Menicoche, in that Highway No. 7 is one of our highways which is desperately in need of some major revisions. We’ve covered off three or four highways, I think, in the budget, but Highway No. 7 is quite obviously missing any funding in this particular year.
Again, as with Mr. Bromley, I am really pleased to see the emphasis on deferred maintenance. I think it’s done us really well in the last three or four years where we have put an emphasis on deferred maintenance. I think it’s proven to be successful and I’m glad to see that we’re not moving away from that particular tack that we are going to continue to do that.
I guess the last thing that I am a little bit concerned about is carry-overs. It’s not mentioned in the Minister’s remarks, I don’t believe. We have had carry-overs every year in the last Assembly that I was here. Certainly the amount went down somewhat and, actually, I’m not surprised that we have carry-overs, considering the size of our capital budget. In 2011-12 it was huge. We took advantage of the federal stimulus money and it benefitted us greatly. But I guess I would like to know from the Minister whether or not we can anticipate that the carry-overs from this budget year that we’re considering now, 2012-13, whether or not those carry-overs are going to be somewhat less than what we’ve experienced over the last four years. I think we’ve gone down from 35 or so percent down to maybe 25 percent of our projects are carry-overs, but I would hope with a smaller budget dollar amount we would be able to reduce our carry-overs after 2012-13 to something a lot lower than 25 percent.
I think that’s it, Mr. Chair. I don’t have anything else on my list. Thanks very much.