Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the Member’s comments and his ongoing attention to content and detail.
With regard to being more in debt, I would just point out once again, if you put us on a national
comparative scale, we are one of the best managed and best run jurisdictions in the country with our debt to GDP ratio and the amount of interest to revenue that we are paying to service our debt. Most of our debt is self-liquidating.
We actually have about $150-some million or $180 million of actual debt that’s not, at this point, self-liquidating. We made a conscious point during extremely challenging economic times to invest money, to do some very strategic borrowing to, in fact, protect programs and services, not lay people off and still put money into infrastructure, and we’ve done all that. So we’re not just going out of control here. We have very carefully managed debt. I would suggest, as well, that big project that the Member says has no value, I think that the bridge is a legacy piece of infrastructure that is already showing its value. I think the $200 million to $300 million we spend on a big project like Stanton is going to be critical money that should be, and needs to be, spent and will be spent.
It is easy for us to say, in this part of the country where there are roads and bridges and paving everywhere, that a road that opens up a part of the Far North, a critical part of our territory, has no value and it’s not critical and it’s not important. I would suggest to you that if we look at the big picture, that is a big project. It is part of the Northern Strategy of the federal government. It feeds into the value of the North, and roads, in my opinion, as Prime Minister Diefenbaker pointed out, are always good investments. And we’re not closing services down. In fact, we’re expanding services as you look around us with early childhood, midwifery, all those program areas, we are continuing to expand services. If there is a strong exception to the fact that we say it would be fool hardy to put highly volatile resource dollars into running base programs and services, then we should have that political debate and we should look at other jurisdictions. Let’s look at Norway and all that resource money. Not only did they not put it into programs and services, they took it completely offshore. In fact, they haven’t allowed any of that resource money into that economy and they’ve developed a very strong, vibrant, sustainable economy.
If you look at the trouble that Alberta’s having this very day and age, as we sit here talking, with their shortfalls because they put all that money into programs and services, they’ve used it to run their day-to-day operations. When the price fluctuates down, they are $6 billion short. They are paying a premium. They are losing on every barrel of oil, but unlike Norway, which has a $600 billion plus Heritage Fund, Alberta is $18 million after all the years of the oil boom that they've had and the money they’ve had. So if you want to have that discussion, we should have that about what’s the best way to do this. Should we grow the base?
Should we aim to 40 cents on every dollar because that’s what other jurisdictions that are carrying enormous deficits have put money into those program areas and somehow that would make us a better run jurisdiction? We should have that discussion.
We’ve picked, as an Assembly, a track that is worth staying on and I think we have to work hard to stay on that track. We are $50 million more next year into the capital. Devolution is coming and some of those resource royalties will be flowing to us. The red flag projects will be back on the list. We are going to expand midwifery. We are going to do a lot of other things.
For the record, Madam Chair, I will point out, as well, last year the Legislature agreed to put $250,000 to the Heritage Fund. That was to the base. So there is another $250,000 into the Heritage Fund again this year, and it will stay in the base until that figure gets changed through the budget process. We are stretching the money we have in the Sahtu as far as we can. There is also money that’s going to come to us through this Environmental Research Fund that’s going to allow us to supplement that money as we work on groundwater, surface water and wildlife work.
Madam Chair, I appreciate the Member’s comments. I think overall we have a good budget, and we look forward to the discussion with the Member and others as we go forward. Thank you.