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.