Thank you, Madam Chair. I think most of the information or concerns that I have will come out in the details of each department, but I think my biggest concerns today that I’d like to express is the continuing increasing size of our budget. Our expenditures continue to get larger and larger, even though the Minister and the Cabinet keep indicating to us that we’re on fiscal restraint and we want to keep our expenditures down as much as possible, but we continue to grow the size of our budget every year. Phenomenal numbers for the population of 43,000 people.
I think one of the biggest concerns that I see in the budget is the creation of an additional 56 new positions in the GNWT. We’re hitting over 5,000 employees. Those are phenomenal numbers, I think. They’re huge numbers. We’re obviously the main employer in the Northwest Territories. That doesn’t include numbers of NGOs and associations that the government funds. So how much of our economy is basically driven on the back of the GNWT. Our budget is astronomic.
Along the lines of those employment numbers, one of the priorities in this Assembly is to do decentralization. Granted, I’m appreciative of the fact that my community is seeing some of that decentralization, but when you look at the numbers, a creation of 56 new jobs continues to be anywhere from 25 to 26 positions of those are created in Yellowknife. So I mean, we’re still keeping 50 percent to the capital and 50 percent to the other regions spread out throughout the Territories. The department and the budget indicated 18 decentralization positions. Well, that’s not a very big number. When you say in one budget they’re creating 56 new jobs, that’s a very small number. So how much are we committed to decentralization as a government? I have a big concern with that.
Like I said, if we’re creating 56 and we’ve only decentralized 18 of them, it’s a very small number. It’s an astronomically small number. So are we really committed to decentralization or are we just doing it lip service to the Members that are out in the regions in trying to fulfill this priority of our Assembly?
I think people talk about the fact that we have a surplus, but we know that surplus is being expensed on financing of infrastructure projects. So I think we’re not in a bad position but, I mean, I am concerned with the growth of our budget in the last 10 years. I’ve said it in this House before that our budgets have grown astronomically, our PY positions have grown astronomically since division. Everything’s doubled, if not more. We need
somehow to put a rein on some of these expenditures.
I know there’s a group in our public that want to see us do more, but there’s also a group that are doing business out there and saying how can we continue to afford this. We’re doing it with no increased taxes. Eventually that wall is going to come down where we basically have to flood people with a bunch of additional taxes to pay for some of these costs. I know devolution is coming, and I know the federal government is going to be kicking… We’re going to get more money from them on our resource sharing, but a lot of that is dependent on diamonds. If our diamonds go away, what does that do to our economy?
I think we need a better hold on growth of the size of the budget, growth the size of the public sector. We need to do more creating jobs in other ways. I am happy to see that we’re putting money into tourism. I agree that it’s not the amount that we wanted to see originally, but I think we’re going to get there. Maybe the phased-in approach is probably the most effective way to do that.
I guess those are my initial concerns with the budget, the fact that it’s just continuing to grow. It’s a growing monster, and we need to rein it in somehow.