Thank you, Madam Speaker. On this last day of replies to the budget address, I wanted to offer my insight into our current budgeting process on the operations budget.

As Members know, this is the third budget we are doing collectively as the 17th Legislative Assembly.

There is some work in here, a lot of good work

that’s gone over the years into this budget, starting from the very first one we started and focusing on taking different approaches on how we move things with this government.

I want to start today by referring to a line that was in the introduction during last week’s budget address and that is the Minister said that he would like to thank the Members of the Legislative Assembly for their help in putting this budget together. Although we do like the acknowledgement, it begs to differ on how much input the Minister listened to Members on this side of the House when putting this budget together.

There are a lot of good things in this budget and there is a lot of other things that we feel could have been put in here. Obviously, there was a lot of debate around the Heritage Fund. Moving forward, it’s good to see that this government is taking that initiative and that step and listening not only to committees on this side but also people of the Northwest Territories who went ahead and made the recommendations to get this money in for future generations.

There are a lot of good highlights as well as a lot of challenges we are facing. Cabinet and Members are all quite aware of that, but there’s also something that I want to mention. The Minister also said if we are to stem this trend of declining populations and reducing our economic growth and our ability to fund programs and services, that we must do things differently. I think right from the beginning of this Assembly, we’ve done things differently. We’ve looked at investing in our people more than just doing the care and treatment that this government has always done.

Speaking with some of my constituents and people that do work on behalf of government, there were some really good discussions I had in terms of saying just because things have been done like five, 10, 15 or 20 years doesn’t mean we are doing it right. This government is actually making a change by actually investing in our people and our communities. I’d like to see that continue moving forward and we have to do things differently. For instance, the e-learning up in the Beaufort-Delta, where kids in smaller communities are getting a better education now because of the initiatives that were put forth by the Beaufort-Delta Education Authority and getting the funding using their own funding to put this program in place so that all students have that opportunity for advancement in their education.

One other thing that caught my attention here was how we are going to increase our economic growth by increasing our population by 2,000 people. That’s quite the goal and I’m really interested to see how that works out.

There was actually a good news article, as well, on how we are building houses in our small

communities. The Minister referred to having these houses in communities for people that we’re trying to recruit from outside of the jurisdiction. I support that, but at the same time, we do have housing issues in our communities that need to be addressed, as well, and upgrades there. So we’re definitely focusing on one type of clientele and totally forgetting about our residents in the small communities who live there.

I know we’ve talked about these job recruitment strategies, as well, and the 80/20 program, I like to call it, where individuals can apply on jobs and get paid 80 percent of the salary where 20 percent is actually given to them. We had questions for the Department of Human Resources the other day that when these job descriptions are brought forward, there is a part in there that says years of experience are needed. We aren’t allowing our people to get these jobs because they don’t have the experience to get those jobs. They are being overlooked.

I made reference to this on a couple of occasions and in meetings with the Minister, I don’t feel comfortable rubberstamping this budget going forward. Obviously, Members have made a lot of recommendations in this budget. We’ve been pretty successful in the past. I know that some Ministers say it’s not rubberstamping and that committee does have input into this. We had input into last year’s budgets and, actually, we have two great Ministers’ statements here on the Community Wellness Plan and one was on NWT tourism and parks. All the great stats that came out of the Ministers’ statements, would they have been there if committee hadn’t made those recommendations to get funding into NWT Tourism last year? There are a lot of good groups out there doing great work on behalf of government. They just need a little bit of support, a little bit more, sometimes, financial resources. We have the opportunity to give it to them.

We are doing investments now into early childhood development. We’re moving on with the Anti-Poverty Strategy, education renewal, and we have a hardworking group of individuals on this side, and I know Cabinet works just as hard, but there are other people out there that do great work.

When we look at the budget, it’s not about the numbers. When we look at the numbers in the budget, we are looking at GNWT employees, we’re looking at organizations and not only looking at that but its families. We talk about economic growth, we’ve got to support these individuals, get them healthier and get them into the workforce as well.

In terms of this budget, the Minister went out and did a public dialogue, recommendations that came out of that. We don’t always see them in the budget here, but something I haven’t seen in here, in any of these budgets, is something from the Beaufort-

Delta leadership. I know all Members of Cabinet come and listen to the Beaufort-Delta leadership when they have their conference on a yearly basis. Whether those get addressed or not is not always the case.

We go through this main estimates process that has a lot of hours that go into this that keep our researchers and staff working. We listen to the departments, we listen to organizations and we make those recommendations based on what the departments are telling us or that need, and we on this side try to accommodate them by bringing these forward into the budget session. We’re not perfect and there are a lot of challenges we have both with our economic growth but also within the people of the Northwest Territories.

I wouldn’t say that I’m disappointed in this budget because over the last two years previous we have gotten that input in there, we’ve started moving on some of these action plans and at the end of the day, when this government is finished, the 17th Legislative Assembly is going to be the government that says, you know, it was this government and this group of Members that invested in our people with our Early Childhood Development program, that invested in the mental health and addictions, that decided we’re going to start changing things so that our people in the future have a better, healthier life but also healthier communities, and we don’t see all these stats and they’re not just becoming statistics but being part of society.

We’ve put a lot of money into income assistance, income programs and yet we have all these job vacancies. There’s got to be an action plan there to get these people back into the workforce, back to becoming taxpayers in our communities rather than always relying on government to take care of them.

I don’t have much more to say. I really wanted to wait to hear what the federal budget address was going to be before I made any comments on this. I guess one last thing I can leave the government with is that I know over the next three years the federal government has made a commitment to bringing $70 million across the three territories in health initiatives. We’ve got some great opportunities here to address some of these health initiatives in our communities and as we move forward that we look at access to those dollars for some of committees’ priorities, but it’s not just committees’ priorities, it’s committees that speak on behalf of departments but also on behalf of organizations across the Northwest Territories that do need that little extra top-up and support for the work that they do.

Not much further to say and I just wanted to give my reflections on this year’s budget. Hopefully, as we get started moving to the departments, we can start seeing some better partnerships and some

better and open discussion moving forward. Thank you.