Thank you, Mr. Chair. Welcome to the Minister and guests, witnesses here. I guess I just wanted to throw out general comments here because I’m very concerned about the paucity of projects and especially meaningful work and progress on many of the major issues we have on education infrastructure.
Less than 2 percent of our capital budget this year is dedicated to this department, our second largest department and probably one of the very highest priorities we have as a government in an area where we’re not shining, and we know we need to do what we can both in terms of how we do things and the places we do them in. Amazingly, this is the second year in a row. As low as this budget is this year, it’s even lower than it was last year. Albeit we ended up spending more than predicted, it was still very, very modest.
My big concern here is education, which this department is a critical department in many areas. Education is one of the very critical areas that it’s big in. If I look at the capital infrastructure budget for the education aspects of this department it’s hardly detectable. It’s less than half of even the less than 2 percent. So we’re getting down beyond the undetectable, or into the undetectable area.
You know, we’ll be bringing out some specifics, I’m sure, as we go into the details here, but I think there are major areas in every region. In my area in Yellowknife here, we certainly have been pushing some things with little action. They’re long overdue. Probably one of the biggest is Mildred Hall and, of course, probably Sissons is the biggest where again we’ve been talking about it for a long, long time and it’s a shambles. We’re now doing a planning study this year, but again, amazingly, my jaw dropped when I didn’t see any intent to act on the plan in this coming year’s budget. This fiscal year we are doing a plan and then we’re going to put it on the shelf and let it become dusty and out of date, I guess, for a while.
Again, this is not fully the fault of this Minister. I think it’s Cabinet that has come up with this very unbalanced budget. So I guess I’ll leave it at that, and maybe in terms of a question for the Minister, what’s happening here? This is a priority, you have the backup of this Assembly. Why are we not more successful at getting a balanced capital budget and getting going on these areas that we have been lax on for so long to the point where education is being compromised because of an infrastructure situation that we have the capacity to deal with? I’ll leave it at that. Thank you, Mr. Chair.