Thank you, Madam Chair. I think there is a shared concern about the growth of government. We’ve squeezed government back from the days of annual 6 percent plus growth down to 2, down to next year we’re going to be aiming to 1.5 percent.
As you’ve heard around the table already, there is a concern and demand that we spend more money on program areas at the same time as we try to manage our money. We agree that the size of the public service is very large. As we try to control our growth going forward, one of the things that we are looking at is controlling position growth, unless it’s tied to a legal or mandatory responsibility. Any other requests would have to be reallocation of internal resources.
I mentioned that next year we’re looking at being able to take advantage of some of the fruits of our labour of the last two years. That $50 million that I talked about is in addition to the Tuk-Inuvik highway, Stanton, and the Mackenzie Valley fibre optic line. We will be able to address other issues such as the red flag list.
We are committed to decentralization. At this point we’ve talked about it, and we’re planning it with devolution. We’ve done an initial phase 1 of taking existing low-hanging fruit, as it’s been described, for decentralization. But on a go-forward basis, we’re going to have to prove to this House what it means
with the other jobs coming to us, especially the jobs coming from Ottawa. The commitment is there.
The surplus that we referred to is an operational surplus. We’re about $580 million in debt or thereabouts. Operational surpluses are savings during the year, one time, which we put towards infrastructure. I just want to make sure the folks listening don’t think that we’ve got a separate bank account where we saved all this money, because we have the ongoing debt which we have to manage.
I agree with the Member, and this Legislature has agreed, with the fiscal plan that we’ve laid out. We have to control our expenditures. We don’t want to count on taxation. It’s counterproductive at this point. It’s not so much a revenue issue at this point as it’s still an expenditure one. There are still additional revenues coming here which are not reflected in this budget because we haven’t inked the deal. When we get devolution, we’ll be coming back with a reworked fiscal framework.