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?