Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like speak quickly to the motion and to our responsibility as legislators and our commitment and obligation to the broad, overall fiscal plan for the Government of the Northwest Territories.
The motion is clear, even though I’ve heard everyone who is supporting it has a different interpretation. It doesn’t mean paying people, it doesn’t mean giving money for toothbrushes, it will only be restricted to people who don’t have work and have to get compensated for their wages, but it doesn’t mean cousins, families and those people who aren’t working. There is a whole range of interpretation to this motion, but the motion is clear. The motion says compensate people for their time. I would suggest to you that this is indeed a slippery slope. If you are going to compensate person X and person Y is not working but they’re going to go, then it’s going to be what is it about me that is not worthy of getting the same compensation for my time? My time is worth something. It will be a door that once you open it, it will be open for everybody. It’s going to cost us a lot of money.
I think there is a review underway that we should look at and it makes good political discussion, but there is a real concern. People listening out there are going to think we are going to come up with a whole bunch of money we don’t have.
At the same time, we pass the budgets in here and we know that we are going to be trying to remove $30 million to try to balance our books as we move forward and pay for a whole agenda that we have already laid out before us. There was debate in this House, let’s drop the PTR back to 10 to 1, 20 million bucks. Let’s give the school board $50,000, two or three million dollars. At the same time, we know we’re going through forced growth exercises to maintain the budget, to maintain our fiscal standing, to keep ourselves in good fiscal condition.
So you can’t just look at this in isolation. You can’t look at this and forget about what we’ve asked for just in the previous questions about junior kindergarten or forget about some of the other demands that have been made upon the government, upon us, this Legislature, in previous sittings.
While it may be well intentioned, we always worry about program creep. In my mind, this would be more like program leap. It would be fiscally unsustainable. Further to the comments by my colleague from the ministry of Health, this has significant implications and we should just give the study its chance to do its work. There have been commitments made, but I don’t fully support this. So we won’t be voting in favour, as my colleague said.