Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess my concerns have ramped up annually based on the track we’ve taken, focus on infrastructure and money rather than people where the real potential for gains are. As I understand it from this budget and our current conditions, just starting with our current conditions, unexpected costs, $50 million for forestry, $20 million unexpected and un-consulted expenditures for further subsidies on electricity rates, $40 million indicated in this budget for the Inuvik-Tuk highway, that’s $110 million that goes against our borrowing limit and burrows into our $100 million debt limit. We need an infrastructure budget, Mr. Chair, that is embedded within our fiscal strategy, and that’s the relevance here. These are of grave concern. How many years now have we heard the Minister say we’re going to spend this, a lot, on infrastructure – this year over $300 million on infrastructure – but next year we’re going to return to normal, and we never return to normal. We continue to say, oh, yeah, no, we’re going to go for it; we’re going to bump up our borrowing limits and so on. There are really serious concerns about our approach and our capital plan in this case.
The Minister mentioned our net fiscal benefit from devolution which was negotiated at $120 million a year and now it’s $113 million a year for a five-year average. This year, I understand, it’s about $80 million. This is all relevant to this budget. We didn’t hear that that’s the case. Then there’s the population loss, all of which affects the money that we have available, the revenue from which we draw this capital budget.
When we are putting a capital budget together, we need to consider our fiscal strategy, where this fits in our fiscal strategy, and what we have is a record of significant events. This year there’s $110 million of unexpected. We don’t know what it’s going to be next year when we’re entertaining this budget, but I would say we need to be conservative, based on these sorts of events. I don’t see that happening with this. It’s always the next year.
Again, previous years we’ve heard that the capital budget will be modest the following year. Again, we have an extraordinary 300-and-some million dollars, and that’s before we start adding to that budget, which we know happens every single year, and we know for a fact that this Cabinet has other expenditures in mind that we’re not able to see clearly and discuss, and again, this is not a great basis for being able to critique a capital budget.
Meanwhile, we’re contemplating even more mega development with the Mackenzie Highway project. Again, what we’re doing is lining up to leave all these huge commitments and gaps in ability to provide for these commitments for the 18th Assembly with our compliments. Not something that I’m comfortable with.
Certainly, the $40 million on the Inuvik-Tuk highway, I think, again, that’s precursor to this budget, so I’ll leave that for another time. But there are huge issues that are not addressed in this. For example, despite the legal requirements to provide infrastructure as required by the courts for the Francophone educational system, the education budget remains at 2 percent, despite being something like 25 percent of our budget operationally. For the third year in a row, 2 percent of our capital budget for education. This despite the fact that we have schools like Sissons, 40 years old, needing tens of millions of dollars in renovations.
Again, this is not a complete budget. We know that. Either that or we’re just accepting fines from the court or something. I don’t know.
Again, this shows a focus on infrastructure despite the fact that Northerners have a record of achievement in the absence of infrastructure as long as they are given appropriate supports, and this government’s approach is to throw money at infrastructure, particularly to try and attract mega development when we know the global economy is not there. This is not going to be realized, and there are good reasons for that. Things are being undermined in a whole systemic sense and those days are gone.
The Stanton Hospital P3 Project, I know I and certainly others are questioning the P3 approach particularly given the lack of real opportunity or opportunity for real input to the P3 process and particularly at decision points which are made without input by committee. I know committee, when we reviewed the P3 policy, it did have an opportunity for input then and we were not particularly happy with the outcome of that.
I think I’ll leave it at that and anticipate providing other general comments during departmental discussions.