Thank you, Mr. Chairman. What we have been hearing here this afternoon are, truly, general comments, not specific to this particular capital budget but very general. That’s a good discussion to have and I think it’s a good discussion to have in public, so that people can really kind of hear where we are coming from.

A few things I want to touch on, we talk about our infrastructure deficit here in the North and we talk about putting a few more millions of dollars, $50 million extra into the infrastructure capital budget. I

don’t know how we compare to other jurisdictions, but might I be so bold as to suggest that for a jurisdiction such as ours and the number of people we have, that we have a lot of very, very good high-end infrastructure. Maybe we could be more easily compared to another territory, but I bet if you went into communities in northern Saskatchewan, northern Manitoba, northern Alberta, places like that, and you look at the infrastructure they have, I would say we are the infrastructure elite here in the Northwest Territories.

This building we are sitting in is an example of it. I objected when this building was built 20 years ago. I thought it was over the top. I thought meeting in the Explorer or the Yellowknife Inn was good enough. I kind of objected to it. Now that I’ve worked here for 18 years, I kind of like the place.

---Laughter

I made a bold statement back then when they commissioned this building, that if I was ever elected to this Legislature, I would pitch a tent in the backyard and protest for the government spending this many millions of dollars, but I’ve actually had my office indoors all this time.

I think we have to sometimes put things into perspective, you know. When we build things, we build them large, we build them grand. I mean the Inuvik school. I don’t know what the final number is, I don’t even want to say a number because who knows what the real number is, but we go into these projects maybe not with the most utility frame of mind. I am going to have the NWT Construction Association and the NWT Architects Association mad at me, I’m going to say that right off the bat, but we go into it with a very open mind and a very open chequebook. I don’t think when we’re building infrastructure like that, we’re thinking about ways to save money. I don’t think we’re thinking about energy efficiency for the operating costs as we go along. So when you see the disparity between that school and then some of he needs in some of the smaller communities where we haven’t got basic things, I question how we approach capital projects with such a basically unlimited budget. That bothers me.

I have said for years, I still think when the government builds stuff, it costs a lot more than when anybody else builds things. When the private sector goes to build something, they are very attuned to all those kinds of ways of getting the most value for money, getting the most energy efficient. The private sector would look at all those things. I don’t get the sense that our government looks at a lot of those things and it kind of bothers me.

I guess growing up in small town Ontario where the house I grew up in was 100 years old…The other thing that amazes me still is when we do spend these millions and millions on infrastructure, we

don’t really build for the long term, it doesn’t seem. It seems like we are planning for a midlife retrofit or everything to all be changed in 20 or 30 years. Again, I don’t know. Maybe that’s what it is everywhere. Certainly if you go to Europe you’ll see some old buildings, but when we build buildings it doesn’t seem like we are planning for the long term. If we are going to spend all that money up front, let’s make sure they last a really long time, and I’m not sure that’s something that’s taken into consideration. Maybe it is and I just don’t know about it.

I think if we want to get more stuff on the ground, more projects on the ground, I think we need to really look at the purpose of the building and not be building monuments to somebody’s creativity, monuments to whatever local focus group came up with boutique kind of ideas for approaching capital projects.

One of the things that used to bother me a lot, too, and maybe we’ve gotten away from this now, is when we look at the soft cost of a project – and everybody has heard me say this before – do we have to reinvent all those soft costs and all those fees when we are designing or building things like community buildings or fire halls or things like that that are utility type things? Do we have to have all the design costs associated with that? Do we have to keep reinventing things like that? I think there are ways to do things, if we truly have an infrastructure deficit and we do want to get more infrastructure on the ground and more projects built in the communities where they need them, I think that we would not have things like the Inuvik school, if we really believed that. I think we could have done more projects for that total price tag of that school and given a few other communities a small, reasonably priced school and not put so much…The Inuvik school needed to be replaced. Sometimes infrastructure is worn out and it is not practical to fix it up, but sometimes – I am going to bring up the Hay River hospital – maybe doesn’t meet government standards but it’s still workable infrastructure for it to be used for something.

So I am really reluctant. An argument can be made to me to convince me, but I would be very surprised if that building doesn’t still have a useful life in it for something.

On the subject of Hay River, Mr. Menicoche was talking about how projects get into the capital plan and eventually come to fruition. So we lost the young offenders facility but we got the new assisted living facility, which was maybe altogether a $10 million project. That’s good. It’s up and operating and providing a useful purpose.

The midlife retrofit on the Diamond Jenness Secondary School, we made it under the wire with not having to replace that but being able to retrofit

that. That was a $35 million project which just finished.

The new health care facility is another $65 million project, which was in the works for a long time and it is underway. It will probably be completed and operational in the lifetime of this Assembly.

The Health Minister has assured us for Hay River that we will have the replacement in some form of those 10 extended care, long-term care beds, that are currently in the Hay River hospital that are not going into the new facility.

There are new housing units that are on tap for Hay River as well. There’s the demolition and removal, disposal and removal of some public housing infrastructure and inventory and there’s replacement in the works.

So I would say that pretty much a lot of things that were in the works and in the planning and in the sights of MLAs like myself for many years have come to fruition in Hay River. I would say that there isn’t a lot of extra capital projects I am going to be fighting for in the next two years, so it is somebody else’s, it is another community’s turn to see that and we need to be fair in the distribution of those capital dollars as well.

I’m not saying the Ecole Boreale School couldn’t use a gymnasium and an addition if there was capital money available. We’d like to see that along with one of the French schools here in Yellowknife. But for the most part, a lot of the capital needs in Hay River have been addressed.

When we are looking at infrastructure, I just wish as a government we could look at it from the point of view…The Premier read off the six criteria, but also we need to look at its utility, its practicality, its longevity, its efficiency of operating in terms of the costs. There are a lot of things that we need to look at.

Those are my very general comments about how we acquire capital here in our jurisdiction. I don’t think we should ever lose sight of the fact that we have some pretty amazing infrastructure for a population of 42,000 spread over 33 communities. Thank you.