Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a number of questions that don’t need to be answered today. Many of them are rhetorical, but in looking at the budget address, I found it raised a number of questions in my mind. I don’t need answers that are detailed, but I do want to raise a number of concerns that I have.

Right off the top, the budget address stated that Members had helped with the budget. Yes, we certainly had input into the budget. We certainly had any number of meetings where we provided our comments, but like other Members, I don’t really feel that this budget reflects the handprint of Regular Members.

I mentioned the other day, and I have to mention it again, I am particularly disturbed about the percentage of our resource revenues that is going to go to the Heritage Fund. The budget is based on 5 percent, and as I mentioned the other day, there certainly is evidence that 25 percent is a much more realistic number. It’s what I would say the majority of residents want, and it certainly is something that I think the Finance Minister heard during his consultations, but it seems to me that it was ignored.

I’m trying to understand the logistics of the way the cash is going to flow from our resource revenues. From what I understand of the budget, we’re intending to spend our resource revenues in this budget year of ’14-15, but we’re not going to actually receive the dollars until ’15-16. I think it’s some 16 months after the beginning of this fiscal year is when we’re going to actually get those resource revenues, so the only thing I can figure is that we are going to borrow in order to spend the resource revenues that are identified in the budget but that we don’t have the cash for yet. So I guess that is a question that I could appreciate an answer from the Minister on.

I mentioned the other day, as well, that there’s no new revenue source in the budget, and that really concerns me. I’ve mentioned this every year for, I think, the five or six years that I’ve been here. We certainly have an inflationary increase on taxes and

fees, and that’s a good thing. We’ve established a policy whereby liquor and tobacco, for instance, the taxes on those go up every year, and our fees, the fees that we charge, those are increased based on inflation every year. But we need, as Mr. Dolynny said I think it was last week, a new revenue source, and I have yet to hear from the government that they’re willing to identify and to look into a new revenue source, and so I would hope that the Minister, in light of the loss of tax revenue that we’re experiencing this year, I would hope that the Minister is going to commit to actually do something about finding a new revenue source and establishing a new revenue source, because we definitely need to increase our revenues.

I’m surprised, and I mentioned the drop in our corporate income taxes, and I think the Minister has said it’s somewhere around 30 or 40 million dollars, and I am quite surprised that that’s mentioned in the budget address, but at the same time, the Minister said that we still expect to spend $100 million on our capital. I’m having a little trouble reconciling that we have this huge drop in revenue but we are still able to spend more on our capital than we did in this current budget year.

The other thing is that the budget address states that our revenues are up 2.8 percent, and it says that our tax reduction, so the loss of our $30 million in taxes, is offset by an increase in our federal grant, so I’m having difficulty reconciling. We’re losing $30 million. We’re gaining $30 million on our grant. The net result is that our revenues are going up 2.8 percent, and yet it sounds as though we’re in a deep hole.

One of the things that again I have to ask rhetorically, is if, as was suggested by the Minister, I think, in answer to questions, is if we are so strapped, if we have to exercise fiscal restraint, what are we doing spending money on new initiatives? Why are we not funding those new initiatives from within? Why are we not using internal reallocation? I think it’s been said by Members quite often before, new initiatives don’t have to have new money, and when we don’t have new money, which is what we’re hearing, then we shouldn’t be using new money for our new initiatives or we shouldn’t have new initiatives at all. I’m not so sure I would agree with that though.

The Minister has mentioned in the last few days that we can expect a $30 million supplementary appropriation coming up in the near future. It will impact this particular budget year, and I think he said that it is cost-driven expenditures. I understand that, but every year that I’ve been here, we have overspent our budget, and I wonder, in the 2014-15 O and M budget how have we planned and how will we plan for the over-expenditure of budget which we know is coming. It’s something which I don’t think we do well. We basically set our budget, we

set a contingency for that budget, which I believe is in this budget as well, and then we overspend that contingency, I think, regularly just like clockwork.

We’ve heard, certainly in the last year and I believe it carries forward into this new year as well, that we need to do short-term borrowing in order for us to operate fiscally from day to day, from month to month, and that cash flow is a problem. So I don’t quite know how this new budget, how the 2014-15 budget is going to address our cash flow problem and our short-term borrowing problem.

I have some concerns about the Mineral Development Strategy. There is about $2 million that’s going into the Mineral Development Strategy actions to address that, and I am concerned that much of this $2 million is going to go to industry, who I feel are generally well financed anyway. Maybe some junior exploration companies are not, but I really feel that we could be putting a lot of that money, a lot of that $2 million into other areas where we have great demands. It makes me wonder whether or not there was a cost-benefit analysis that was done to prove the value of putting money into the Mineral Development Strategy.

Did we look at what we’re going to gain by spending this money on industry? Did we look at whether or not our social programs would be a better cost benefit than putting money into the Mineral Development Strategy?

I find that this government, almost to a fault, pushes economic development without considering the effect that that economic development is going to have on our programs and services. That is a concern that exists for me.

We have a number of major projects, I guess, which have been mentioned a number of times. The Mackenzie Valley fibre optic link, we have the hydro expansion dream, we have Stanton Hospital renovations, we have the Mackenzie Valley Highway and they are all great projects, but I wondered, as I considered the budget address, why we are struggling to do them ourselves. There was talk of P3s a little while ago. That seems to have disappeared. Private partnerships, Aboriginal governments, other government partnerships, where are they?

I am especially concerned about the hydro project. From what I understand, we are spending money in this next budget year to prove whether or not there is a business case. My recollection is that we have spent many millions of dollars to date trying to prove a business case for another project. Do we really need to spend another many millions of dollars to try and prove a business case for this project that, in my mind, is really quite circumspect in terms of whether or not it’s going to make us money.

There has been a lot of talk about the increase to the borrowing limit. Some people are for it, some people are against it. I can see a value in increasing our borrowing limit to the level that the Finance Minister would like to see it, but it really depends on how it’s used, in my mind. If we have a borrowing limit of $1.8 million, it would allow us to do some of the major projects that we can’t do right now because we are so close to our borrowing limit.

I think we have been fiscally prudent as a government and I think that we do manage our debt quite responsibly, so if we had the room in our borrowing limit and a major project did come along, it would give us the opportunity to be able to do it. But I’m not advocating that because we get a $1.8 million borrowing limit that we need to immediately borrow up to that limit. That’s not at all what I would want to see.

Mr. Chairman, I see that my time is fast evaporating. If I have an opportunity to come back again, I would ask you to put me back on the list. Thank you.