Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to start very bluntly by saying I am very concerned about the narrow thinking that persists from the Minister, despite years of very consistent input from Regular Members. I think that is really the main point, that we have the opportunity to do a better job. But, I suppose, the Minister has said very flatly that these are cooperatively developed budgets and we’ve had a big role to play and so on, and I’m not saying that we don’t have a role at all. But I think what the Minister is hearing is that there are clear examples out there that we have consistently attempted to work with Cabinet on through the years. Probably the best example here today before us, of course, is the Heritage Fund, which my colleague Mr. Bouchard has addressed very thoroughly. These are new dollars, as he mentioned and as we know, so let’s do it right from the start. The Minister says, well, that’s very simple to say. No, no, it’s not simple to say, but it is very clear, and in fact this House passed a motion directing this Assembly to institute a 25 percent set-aside for the Heritage Fund. Cabinet ignored it.

I won’t repeat all of Mr. Bouchard’s points. The Minister said again how cooperative we are and referenced junior kindergarten as called for by committee. That, in my mind, is not true. In fact, my impression is that committee is somewhat or quite equivocal about junior kindergarten. In actual fact, what we called for repeatedly, and have done for years now, is a clear focus on early years programming. That’s age zero to three. Junior kindergarten starts after that period. Even, in fact, when we insisted on that in previous budgets and ensured that there was additional monies dedicated to that, for example, for family resource centres, midwifery and so on, the work was not done. I don’t know what happened to the money; the money was provided.

I guess support for mining again. Has the Minister not noticed that more and more workers are coming from the South, or essentially commuting, and it is at our cost? I think some valid questions are being asked out there. How many Northerners, how many additional Northerners want to work in mines? That is a legitimate question to ask. We know that as the number of workers in mines increases, so does the southern labour force that’s commuting to our mines. How beneficial, in fact, is all this training to

work in mines? I would say again, the data is pretty uncertain there. We know that people are getting trained here and leaving to work elsewhere in Canada in mines. We know that they are also leaving to commute. They are deciding to live down south. I was talking to a person today that falls into that category.

The Minister said that we have to expand our economic base; that’s the only way to deal with this. That again assumes that it is a job shortage that is always the problem, and in some areas, undoubtedly, that is the case, but in my mind, I don’t think in those areas that mining jobs are what is being sought. So there are some fundamental assumptions here that I will be using the various vehicles that I have to address these as we go through the budget.

On this one, expand our economic base apparently means building big, costly, low job infrastructure that is very expensive to maintain and does not have proven economic benefit analyses to support it, or data that is demonstrably economically beneficial, such as the bridge. So, again, this is a consistent comment that this Minister has heard for a couple of Assemblies that indicates that, yes, we do need to do things differently. This whole argument of doing it the same way harder is starting to sound very hollow to me and I suspect to some of my colleagues. The world has changed and there are many new realities that must be acknowledged. I’m not seeing that happen.

We have heard, during the life of this Assembly, Cabinet spend over and over and over the net fiscal benefit, so now here we are with this approach and we are confronted with a bunch of closed doors and a failure to do the basic thing of putting significant dollars aside into the Heritage Fund as if it’s a surprise to the Minister.

I’m afraid we’re reflecting the immaturity that many are faced with these days of instant gratification. We want everything right away. It used to be that there was some reality in the North and we developed things as we could afford it and as we knew it was needed, but we now are going full tilt. Let’s get our $3 billion worth of infrastructure out there as fast as we can, hoping it will have some return when, at the same time, acknowledging some of the fundamentals that are changing in our society.

I will have lots more comments, but I will leave it at that, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much.