Thank you, Madam Chair. I think, first and foremost, I need to congratulate the department on providing a signed copy of these public accounts at least one month sooner than they did in 2012 and it was tabled in November 2013, which is, again, three months sooner than the process that we did, the first time we’ve done this in many, many years. I appreciate the government for doing that.

Although the government may have received what the Auditor General called a “clean opinion,” it’s important to note that variances in any one category greater than $24 million are not followed up in any of the samplings of the Auditor General. Therefore, we could still see some smaller variances that are possibly not captured within that framework of this audit and that it could have a huge impact on our bottom line.

We also need to talk about our finances from a sustainability, a flexibility and a vulnerability aspect and that was echoed loud and clear within that report and it’s no secret that our Territorial Formula Finance Grant is our main life support and we’re depending on it with our own antiquated and limited own-source revenues. Moving forward we know that this is going to be very problematic, as was noted by the Auditor General.

The Auditor General notes that the GNWT continues to be stable, but equally notes that we have limited flexibility to raise new revenues and it did emphasize many times of that vulnerability over control of our future revenues. Although the Auditor General did not go into it because this is something relatively new, questions around the opportunity for us to take what we know on our public accounts and look at the future servicing of debt is what we’ve heard from the department here about possibly raising our debt ceiling to well over $1.8 billion. This question was posed during a public forum with the comptroller general and there was some doubt and there was some cast of shadow on whether or not we can, from what we know from public accounts, really afford moving forward with such a state of borrowing.

Clearly, even though we see what I think is the appearance of a healthy balance sheet, many in this room know full well that we’re definitely heading into a debt wall – I like to call it the wall of worry – and sometimes when you look at the public accounts it doesn’t really echo that because of the way it’s designed. I just wanted to make sure that that goes out in public. It gets confusing, not only for Members but I think for the public, when you see imbedded within the framework of public accounts issues of debt and net debt. These types of terminologies, I think, really confuse the public and it confuses many of the Members in this room. I think it’s important that somehow we need to be a bit clearer as we move forward within this framework.

We also had within the report, and clearly, that we have huge fluctuations in our personal income tax and our corporate income tax, and I think it clearly demonstrated our lack of understanding and how these changes, and these changes within the framework of this public accounts was roughly to the tune of about $38 million. This does hurt our bottom line and it does have a huge impact on our fiscal strategy for budgeting, as we clearly saw during the main estimate process for this year, and for our large infrastructure planning for years to come.

Also, we talked about within the framework of the public accounts was the issue of the disposal of public housing, public housing loan forgiveness and dealing with public housing rental arrears. Although the Auditor General does say we did follow the proper accounting principles, there is much debt that lingers in the shadows of the books, and this was also talked about within the four walls of committee and also with the Auditor General and the comptroller general of the Northwest Territories. Clearly, this needs to be cleaned up. This is a very aged receivable and we don’t even know the dating of that receivable. This was possibly years that these numbers have been on the books and we’ll never collect this money. So to be prudent, to be fiscally honest with the public, we’re going to need to clean up those arrears and leaving them in the book are, clearly, wrong. I think you might see some future motions on that and we’ll talk about that today.

We have a revenue problem, plain and simple, but the public accounts books clearly indicate that we do have a revenue problem and it is coupled with many of what we called self-reporting mechanisms. One, for example, which I know is near and dear to my heart, is tobacco, and that’s why I continuously talk about that self-reporting and how we do a fairly substantial poor job on validating the collection of. I want to echo the issues of even the petroleum tax, these are self-reporting numbers that the government here does not do an adequate job in making sure that we are collecting our fair share of

taxes properly. Clearly, there is money left on the table and I think we’re failing our residents if we don’t start to think about doing something in those areas.

What adds a little bit of complexity is when we continuously hear the government talk about their Fiscal Responsibility Policy and what they do with the annual surplus. I can probably spend another 20 minutes just on this very topic, but what is concerning to the Members here of the committee, including myself, is really the detailed framework about how this policy is put into action, how this policy is branded and backed up publicly. Quite frankly, the surplus that we had in our books for the fiscal year, it really begs into question where this money or this surplus is going. Again, there are clear definitions around the Fiscal Responsibility Policy, which states 50 percent of that money is to go towards short and long-term borrowing, but we don’t know what that money is, we clearly don’t know if this is new money, old money, old debt and new debt. So there is a lot of ambiguity within the framework of the Fiscal Responsibility Policy and I think that we might even hear more about that later today in some of the motions.

Finally, and again, echoed by the Auditor General themselves, is that the issues of employee future benefits and failing to recognize our liabilities related to the remediation of contaminated sites is going to become extremely problematic for this government. So much so that I believe, and I think some of my Members also will echo this, I’m hoping that we have to start looking at actuaries and to assess what is our risk. I know we’ve got some smart folks up in the Finance department and I’ve always said that we’ve got probably some of the top people in North America working for us, but this is very specialized work. This work requires the expertise, which I believe goes far beyond the four walls of the GNWT and this risk is real and this risk could come back and haunt us. So I’m hoping that through repetition and through emphasis of such things as public accounts and what we’re doing here today will clearly give direction for government to say look, yeah, we recognize this may be out of our realm and we’ve got to do something about it.

So, this is just kind of a general overview of what I picked up as a Member of the committee. I look forward to getting further into detail today. Thank you.