Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to I guess restate that the funding that we get here, certainly it’s known from us that there are pressures, there are costs every time you come to a budget. The unforeseeable ones, a good example is the forest fires. We don’t know. We budget a certain amount and we either go over or under.

I have to support the comments from Ms. Bisaro. If we’re not funding the health and social services, Stanton, the Beaufort-Delta, then we need to fund them properly. This is nuts here. Coming back in for another $3 million, come back next time for another $3 million. This is not good. We have to do that, but there’s a business plan process where we add our list to the government to ask for what we want in our communities. This is operational money. This is not infrastructure. This is operational money that goes to provide services to our hospitals and our health care. People expect that.

Mr. Lafferty talked about the downturn in the mining sector. We knew that was coming. People need to get support from the government. Contractors are laying off people. We’ve given out close to a million dollars in income support. The mining sector said they’re doing good and everything for the Northwest Territories, yet they’re laying off a lot of people. What is the mining sector telling us? The government is left holding the bag.

For the $1.7 million for utility costs for NWT Housing Corporation, my goodness, what numbers are they using? They have to come to us and say we need another $1.7 million for utility costs. Something’s not right here. They have to know the utility costs in our small communities. They should be right up to date. They have housing managers, they have district managers. They have to do their jobs.

The Canadian Blood Services also get blood from donators. Why are we spending close to $3 million?

I guess Mr. Bromley brought up some good comments. Twenty-two million dollars. Are we not telling the departments to bring your numbers up to a realistic figure? Are they so used to, so ingrained in their attitude that we’ll just get a supplement from the government? We’ll make them feel bad, so we have to support them. This affects our people in our communities. Is that a cultural attitude within the government for getting this up?

Look, we’re at $22 million. Someone’s not doing their job. That’s what I’m seeing. We’ll go through it and probably approve everything. Rest assured they will come back again with another supp, different day, different story, but really we need to have a good talk about we’re going to fund Stanton properly and Beaufort-Delta properly. Let’s do a proper job on it. Let’s do a good job. Give them the money if they need it. Or the Hay River or Fort Smith, those boards. Just give them the good money. Do a good job.

The Minister talks about other needs in the community. We’ve been asking that for a long, long time. It takes a long time to get. I guess that’s my sense of the supp. Like I said, if we were a private business we would be broke. We would be out of business. Taxpayers are paying for this no matter what.

So go through the motions. Go through the supp. You know what? It’s going to get approved. What are we approving, that it’s okay to have these kinds of numbers come before us again? These are operational numbers. I can understand the medevacs. It’s important. We pick up the cost. I’m from the Sahtu; we don’t have an all-weather road. Medevacs are very important to my people’s lives. I understand the high cost of it.

I think I’ll leave the rest for details. These are just my general comments thinking about what’s before us right now.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Any response, Mr. Miltenberger?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just quickly, we’ve had this discussion before and there are two basic approaches that I’ve lived through in government. In the old days your current year budget was always based on how much you spent the previous year. Government would spend all their money and at year end they would drive up their budgets and get funding starting that year based on that figure. It was an unsustainable pattern of constant, uncontrollable growth. The Legislature said this is not the way to do business, we cannot control government expenditures, we do not have enough say. So we’re going to set these tough, lean budgets and if they want more money, they’re going to have to come back and justify it to the Legislature as a way to make sure that there was

debate and control, and that we had that kind of say over how the taxpayers’ dollars are being spent. Now there’s from some Members a push to just go back and whatever they spend, we’ll give it to them and if they spend more, we’ll just keep adding it to the budget. We don’t have the oversight. We won’t have it here except once here, when we do the main estimates. That is an important discussion because our cost to government is not getting any cheaper. What is the most appropriate way to get checks and balances as we go forward? What involvement does this Legislature want? Once a year at main estimates and you hope the numbers are right or you come back and justify.

I believe the Minister of Health would like to make a comment, if that’s okay.

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member is talking about the need to reform the governance. Without reforming our governance and operating great parts of health and social services as one system could go a long way to resolving the solution. We have looked at our audit and in the Auditor General’s report they talk about a lot of the cost pressures and how the various authorities do the same programs, the same programs that we deliver to those in a different way. There is savings to be had in the area of putting one system together under procurement. Also in the various aspects of finance where a lot of the back office stuff that is driving the costs at Stanton, for example, may not have to be necessarily housed in the hospital. Where it comes at a premium cost of anything housed in a hospital, because of the nature of how we have to keep the hospitals and have the sick people in there as well. Some of those things are something we’re looking at as a department, and when I referred to having discussions with the various Joint Leadership members from across the various health authorities, we talked about that, on how we could balance out the costs and even reduce costs by reforming the governance at this time.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Next on my list I have Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to pick up on where some of the comments from my previous colleagues were touching base on. I have to concur that, and I’m sure the Minister and his team and the Ministers on the floor are aware that some of us back here as Regular Members are business owners or have been business owners for many years. Although this is probably my first supplemental appropriation in terms of an ask, I don’t think we’re a stranger or I’m a stranger in terms of the markings of what I see here as something very unique. It’s something you

don’t see in business, the type of operation that if this was a business, as the Member for Sahtu indicated, you would be bankrupt.

The thing is I’m hearing from the Minister lean and control and doing so in a way to come back to make sure we spend the right money, but the reality is, this repeats itself time and time again. This is not the first time. I’ve gone back and looked at the history of some of the appropriation asks and a lot of numbers repeat themselves almost to the penny or percentage of the budget. The time and energy that’s taken out of House business to do this year after year after year in terms of preparation for this, I just can’t imagine how much time and energy it is just to get it to the floor here for discussion. It would be mindboggling.

In the world of business we work with mostly a zero-based budget, which really is you work in terms of real dollars, what it’s going to cost you at the end of the day. As mentioned, we’re over $22 million already into supplementary for the year. We’re not talking a small amount of money here; we’re talking a large amount of money. I tend to disagree that this is a lean and mean approach to doing prudent investments for the people of the Northwest Territories. I think it’s far from it. I think it’s a bit of a cloak and dagger, so to speak, where we’re pretending that we’re lean and mean where really we’ve got an endless pot of money that we can come back to time and time again. I think this is not the type of business that I should be supporting as a Member or the people at large.

That said, I’ll have some details for sure, but just from the general comments point of view, when we look at – as the Members for Sahtu and Frame Lake indicated – the Department of Health and Social Services for Stanton and the Beaufort-Delta, if this was a one-time-only I wouldn’t speak about this, but this is a repeated event that happens almost yearly. You can almost set your clock to this. I’m thinking where are we going wrong as government in not making those predictions, or where are we not spending the money properly, or where are we not investing properly.

What makes me even more concerned, and being a health care professional myself, when I hear comments such as this amount will be fully offset by accumulated operating surpluses in other health and social services authorities, which makes me beg to believe that programs may have suffered. That has been quantified. The Auditor General last year in her report clearly identified lack of programs in the areas of diabetes. I’m sure the Member for Sahtu will agree. He brings up diabetes all the time, how the programs weren’t offered. Here we’re basically telling the people of the Northwest Territories we’ll find the money because we didn’t offer all the programs. It’s been documented. I’m not making this up. This has been right from the

Auditor General’s report and it’s a tabled document in this House.

With that first question, with this type of mindset, to the Minister, should we be concerned that this is a culture that we keep going and saying we’ll find the money elsewhere at the sacrifice of the programs?

Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Madam Chair. On a comparative basis if you look across the country, let’s pick one of my favourite provinces just given her size and the magnitude and complexity of the problems they’re dealing with, they’re spending over 45 cents on every dollar on health alone. In this jurisdiction we’re spending about 34 cents of every dollar on health and social services. If you tack on health or tack on all the other social programs, we are spending over 65 cents on every dollar. The growth in social programs is a concern because it limits our ability, but on a comparative basis I would say we are managing ourselves. Maybe not as well as the Member would indicate or see.

One of the challenges we have, of course, as a government is, yes, we can raise taxes, but over the last number of years we’ve chosen not to just because of the economic conditions. Businesses raise prices. They raise taxes. Drugs are one of our biggest costs and it rises and goes right through the roof. Those are costs that we have no choice on. Business can drive their revenues in a way that we can’t. I think we should keep that in mind as well.

This is a good discussion to have about are we doing things right, are we right-sized, are we managing ourselves correctly. I look forward to the discussion, because we’ve been having it for a number of years. This is more than a rubber-stamp, as the Member said. This will be approved because they make sense, and when we stand up and say are we going to cut these programs to our constituents or do we find the money to fund them, we’ve been saying find the money to fund them.

We’re managing ourselves. We’re one of the best run jurisdictions in the country, second probably only to Alberta and possibly the Yukon, in our debt-to-GDP and any other number of indicators, as we’ve demonstrated to you. It’s not like we’re profligate spendthrifts or blowing money like drunken sailors. These are incredibly important initiatives. We struggle trying to meet all these needs and we say no a tremendous amount of the time as well. It is a challenge, Madam Chair, and I appreciate the feedback from the Members as we try to improve how we do this. Thank you.

I’m appreciative that we’re not drunken sailors and it’s a sobering thought that we’re not.

Again, I don’t want to get into a statistical rampage with the Minister here. Again, I mean, stats-wise they say 42 cents of every tax dollar in Canada is being spent in health, and it’s clear that the NWT is spending well under that. The Minister says 34 cents. I believe that number is relatively lower. If we factor some of the pertinence of real health care, I think the number is probably closer to 27 percent. That said, I’ll have more questions with respect to details in the Health area.

One of the other areas I want to bring up is obviously recurring costs that we see. If you look at from last year’s supplementary to this year’s supplementary, when it comes down to the NWT Housing Corporation, in the opening comments of the Minister, $1.739 million is being mentioned here in the opening comments. This is a sobering number that almost mirrors what we saw last year around the same time of a similar nature. Again, going back to forced growth or making good predictions in budgetary terms, how can numbers like this keep repeating themselves time and time again? Why aren’t they part of the regular budgeting process? Thank you.

The main extenuating circumstance with the Housing Corporation, of course, is the significant diminishment of funding from CMHC. They made a determination a number of years ago now that they’re getting out of funding O and M costs for public and social housing, and they’re doing that. The latest, I think, cut was over $900,000. We’re not shutting the houses down, so we carry the cost as long as we can. The Housing Corporation has been asked to fund that from within, but there comes a point where it’s not sustainable. We can’t afford to do that.

The other thing is when you look at our utilities, it’s assumed that the Housing Corporation gets the same rate as ordinary homeowners when, in fact, the Housing Corporation pays a full government rate on all the utilities, and in many communities – and we’ve had this discussion before – it’s a cost-plus program. When you’re driving community services, because there’s a subsidized rate for the residents, if you need more money in that program area, you raise the cost, because the Housing Corporation and the government pay the full rate yet your own citizens will be protected.

There are some very clear extenuating circumstances when it comes to housing. I’m not sure whether Minister McLeod wanted to add more to that or not.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Minister Miltenberger explained it very well. CMHC declining funding is probably one of the biggest drivers. Another one is the fact that we

don’t collect enough revenue from our tenants. If we collected the amount of revenue that was due to Housing, then we wouldn’t have to keep coming back for the $1.7 million. Housing normally has been very good at funding it from within, but with the declining funding, again, it’s getting more and more difficult to try and find this money. We’ve actually had to bail out a particular LHO because they were unable to pay their utility bill at their local hamlet office because they weren’t generating enough revenue.

These are challenges we face and we’re looking, as part of the Shelter Policy review, at the idea of raising what we charge tenants for utilities. We’re faced with challenges there again. We’ve got 768 seniors that pay no rent, but yet those units have to be maintained. If we collected even a minimum amount of rent for those 768 units, that might help offset this again.

We have challenges all around, as the Minister said. We try not to pass these on to the residents as much as we can. That’s why we end up having to eat a lot of these costs. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister McLeod. Next on the list I have Mr. Moses.

Minister Miltenberger, did you wish to comment?

No, Madam Chair. I just appreciate the Member’s comments.

Thank you to the Minister. Mrs. Groenewegen.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Sitting here listening to the general comments of my colleagues, there are issues with the way we spend money. I hear what the Minister is saying, that if we over-budget, then everybody will just make sure they live up to that expectation and spend that much money. If we under-budget, then we have an exercise like we have here today, where we have to come back and ask for additional money and it has to be rationalized. It has to go through Cabinet. It has to go through the FMB process, et cetera. However, I have not yet seen or heard of a good explanation for why the Deh Cho and Hay River health authorities are operating with such surpluses and why the Inuvik and Stanton ones are operating in such deficits. We just hear things that are vague like, oh, those other two are acute care facilities. I want something more substantial than that. That is just kind of a, yeah, that is a given. Those two health authorities are incurring costs associated with acute care, but we need a little bit more in-depth analysis than that

because it doesn’t feel or look right. It doesn’t look and feel right to me when the Hay River Health Authority has to give up its surplus to the Stanton Territorial Health Authority when we haven’t got $20,000 to operate a handivan in Hay River. We haven’t got enough money for a women’s shelter but we are giving back millions in surplus from our operations at our local health authority. That doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t look right. I have never really had an adequate explanation of why that is, but I sit on the Social Programs so I will be continuing to press on that.

…(inaudible)…dollar values that are listed on this sheet. They are high. The Minister says we don’t spend money like drunken sailors. When Mr. Dolynny was agreeing with him, I was saying yes, we do. It has been so long since we have gone to a zero-based look at how we spend our money, we just vigorously guard the status quo. If it is something we already spend money on, we want to keep spending money on it. How often do we sit and look at how much money we spend and what do we get for the money we spend? How much effort do we put into that exercise? Honestly, with all due respect to the folks in the bureaucracy, what incentive do they have to figure out ways to do things differently or more cost effectively? After all, whose money is it? It is really none of our money. None of us are really close enough to the expenditures that we feel like we’re opening our wallets and putting the money out there. Where we feel it is when we have a voice in this House to bring forward the aspirations of our constituents and our communities and we are constantly told no we can’t do that because we have to keep doing things the same old way.

What incentive is there for folks that are on the front line or in the bureaucracy to figure out a way of doing things more cost effectively in a money saving kind of a way? There is none. Can we implement a program where we reward people generously in the public service that come up with a smarter, more effective, efficient way of doing something? I mean, like a big reward. I mean an incentive kind of reward. It’s not their job right now. We don’t actually work at that level so it’s hard for us to sit in some ways on the outside looking in and saying this is how it should be done, but I do have a sense that we do guard doing things the way we always did them. We never take an objective step back from that and say okay, the budget of this government is an enormous amount of money for the people we have here in the territory and for what we have to undertake. Is there something else or a different way we like to spend that so it could encompass more of the things we would like to do?

The other problem with doing that or looking at doing things more cost effectively, and I looked at things on this paper, on this supplementary appropriation, like the 49 residents of ours that are

in care, 49 clients for $5.3 million. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that we could not take care of those NWT residents in the Northwest Territories and keep that $5.3 million, actually do it better than they can do it anywhere in southern Canada for $5.3 million a year. We don’t spend any time or effort analyzing that idea. We just keep writing the cheques, sending them to Alberta. When do we stop ourselves and say look, how can we do a better job? I just don’t get a sense there is a lot of that.

The other problem with doing that on some activities is that the largess of this government is kind of what makes this territory go around. Do we spend too much money on medical travel? Well, there is all the economy that is created with that activity. People fly. I don’t think there are just a few people that are benefitting from that; a lot of the activities of this government have the spin-off effect of creating a lot of economy that keeps turning over and over here in the North.

Again, there is not a lot of incentive for looking at the largess of government and figuring out a way to do things more efficiently or more cost effectively, because as soon as we do that, then I guess we are taking the money out of somebody’s hands. We employ somebody who… It just keeps turning over and over. So it all comes down to priorities. What are our priorities and can we afford our priorities within the current structure of how we do things?

I guess I am still an idealist. I am still optimistic that we can do things better and that we wouldn’t be seeing these kinds of numbers coming back here. It takes analysis and hard work and I will leave it at that. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member has articulated the difficulty at this level trying to manage a system worth a billion for 42,000 people spread over 1.3 or so million square kilometres.

We do, in fact, and have over the years attempted many times to reform government and have reformed government at different junctures, strength at two levels. In the beginning of the 16th Assembly, the government of the day wanted to re-profile $150 million I think it was, or $75 million for savings and some cuts. There was a huge cry over that. You look at things that are dear to people’s hearts. You talked about board reform, supp health where people want to do things with good intentions but you get caught up in those types of circumstances. It is difficult.

We have, over the years, repatriated. That is why we have places like Trailcross and TTC here. The Member for Hay River will remember the effort it went through to get the unit built in Hay River to

repatriate adults from the South that could be served up North. The number of children and adults in care has gone back up in the southern jurisdictions. As the Minister indicated, some have very specific, highly complex needs that we can’t meet up here. Others – the Member is right – we have to keep monitoring. If there are ones that we can build another facility and repatriate, yes, that is definitely an initiative we have to pay attention to. These things, though, take time. It is not an easy business that we are in, but, once again, I appreciate the Member’s comments. She and I have been labouring in the field a long time here. Prior to that, Social Services together as well, so it is a long, slow process and road. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. I have nobody further on the list. Are we done with general comments? Does committee agree?

General comments are concluded. We will go to detail. We will bypass pages 1 and 2 and go to page 3. Members, we are on page 3, Supplementary Estimates (Operations Expenditures), No. 3, 2011-2012, Legislative Assembly, operations expenditures, Office of the Clerk, not previously authorized, $128,000.