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.