Thank you, Madam Chair. I do have a number of comments I want to make with regard to the budget. They’re in no particular order. At the outset I want to say that I do support the fiscal policy that we are currently following. I do agree with the government that we have to kind of keep things down to a dull roar.

With that said, there is a real concern on the part of myself and many other Members that we are leaving ourselves open to increasing our deferred maintenance to increasing our infrastructure deficit. It’s entirely possible that we will be struggling if we don’t increase our capital budget in the near future. I hear from the Minister that yes, in another year or two years’ time there will be an increase to our

capital budget, but I think there are many things that are lacking and I’m going to outline a few of them.

One of the things that I think has been a positive in the last couple of years has been a reduction in the dollar value of the carry-overs that we’ve had from one year to the next. I think that’s a really good move. We did take on a huge infrastructure budget because we were taking advantage of the stimulus funding from the federal government. I think that was a good thing to do but it did leave us, I think, a bit under the gun and I think our staff had a bit of a difficult time in getting all the projects out and enabling us to get contractors to get the work done. I’m glad to see that our carry-over has gone down and I hope that it’s going to go down even more.

I think the ideal would be that we have projects identified in our capital budget earlier, as was mentioned by Mr. Menicoche, so that we can get the projects out and get them done, and I would hope that we’d get down to 5 or 10 percent carry-overs from where we are now. I think that would be optimum.

I note that the Minister talked about $5 million in deferred maintenance. I agree with that. I think that’s absolutely the way to go. We have been spending a great deal of money on deferred maintenance and our buildings, and our infrastructure is such that it’s definitely needed. I fully support that, and if we could, I would increase the amount of money that we spend on deferred maintenance.

There are a couple of projects which are not in the budget which are of concern to me. In the last Assembly there was an indication that we needed, and the department had proven was needed, a facility for girls and women; a new facility for girls and women, for correctional purposes, that was intended to be built in Fort Smith to replace the current women’s facility. That project is nowhere on the timeline of this budget. From what we’ve been told by the Minister and the department, it’s not going to be anywhere on the timeline for another couple of years. That concerns me. The current facility is very badly in need of replacement. Again, our limited capital budget doesn’t allow for us to get that project on the go.

Another area that concerns me, as well, is infrastructure within Education, Culture and Employment. Particularly in Yellowknife, we have two schools that have a need. One for upgrading and renovation, and that’s Sissons. It’s been on the books and then off the books for probably four years now. That is one school that is badly in need of renovation and I don’t see it anywhere on the timeline either. That concerns me. Mildred Hall School is one that still has some work that needs to be done to finish off their renovation project from a number of years ago. Aurora College, the need for

a stand-alone campus for Aurora College is a huge issue for me. The Minister has talked about it a bit and the Department of Education has talked about it a bit but it’s nowhere on the radar.

I am particularly concerned that this budget doesn’t have anything in it that references the Inuvik-Tuk highway. This is a project which this government has committed to. As a Caucus we said it was a priority. We’ve put money into it already. It seems to be a project that we are forging ahead on, and yet in year 2013 we have no indication of capital costs for that project.