Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I’ve listened to the Finance Minister and went through the budget address and looked at some of the highlights, I was quite pleased with some of the initiatives happening in the Northwest Territories, certainly the long-held dream of Cece McCauley in Norman Wells on the Mackenzie Valley Highway and the work towards that, and the government is responding to the oil and gas activity in the Sahtu and other areas around the Northwest Territories that the government is responding with the fiscal restraint that we’re operating under. Of course, the new day for us will be devolution on April 1st in a

couple of months from now.

I’m very surprised and, like Mrs. Groenewegen talked about, there was some creativity with this budget here. I was shockingly surprised to see that there were hundreds of vacant positions within the government. Every year we come to this part of our Assembly and we approve positions, and the government has said there were hundreds of

vacant positions. We approve it, but the money… I don’t know where the money goes. I’m not sure what the exact number is and how many positions are vacant and how much money that relates to, but we should have some discussion because some of our requests don’t quite make the table through the budget address, as one of my colleagues mentioned.

I want to raise that as an alarming concern of the positions that we, as a government, have not yet quite figured out on the efficiency and the effectiveness of government when we have hundreds of vacant positions within our government. That money is approved, it’s there within the departments, but we don’t see the end result of it. What happens to it? We’re asking for positions in our small communities and we’re always asking for these positions, can we get this position, and they keep saying no, there’s no money or it doesn’t quite meet the standards.

So I wanted to say to the government that we’re paying attention over here and we’ll be asking some hard questions the next couple of weeks.