Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank the Member for his comments. I’ve been now in this Chamber with the Member, this is going on our eighth year and I just made note of one of his comments that I put quotation marks around. I never thought I’d hear him say this in the House, and maybe he’ll say I’ve taken it out of context, but I was quite struck by his comment about how we have to be conservative. That’s not something I would normally tie to the Member.
The question I would ask, and we have to ask, is: How do we build the territory, and what investments do we make, and what are those critical investments? We spend $1.6 million on programs and services. We have a very modest capital plan
that we work hard constantly to supplement, and while the Member says that people are happy to live without any infrastructure improvements as long as we have programs, and sometimes you can’t do one without the other as long as we put money into programs and services, well, we are putting $1.6 million into services, and I can tell you, having been around this table now going on to my 20th year, that the capital plan is incredibly
important, especially to those small communities outside of Yellowknife, all the communities outside of Yellowknife. I would suggest, in fact, for Yellowknife, because I’ve seen the intense lobbying for capital dollars in Yellowknife for Stanton, for elders facilities, for shelters, there is a significant interest. I would suggest to you, as well, that people, in fact, rely and expect the government to put capital dollars into play fairly across the territory.
What we are proposing here today was laid out four years ago, or three years ago – we’re going into our fourth year here – where we laid out a fiscal plan. Two years of fiscal discipline. We’ll manage our expenditures. We’ll try to improve our revenues, and we’ll look at beefing up the capital plan $50 million a year in the final two years. We are honouring that commitment, that plan that we laid out and was accepted by the Legislature.
Yes, we didn’t negotiate resource revenue sharing at $120 million. That was the average at that time. We negotiated a resource revenue sharing agreement that says we collect 100 percent of the royalties. Fifty percent goes to the federal government, 25 off the top goes to the Aboriginal governments, 25 of what’s left goes to the Heritage Fund, and the rest we put towards infrastructure and debt repayment, recognizing, as I said in my comments this morning, that’s a very volatile area and it will continue to be, which is why we’re keeping it out of the area of programs and services and building that expenditure into our base.
The Member said that there are other expenditures that we, the government, are not telling people about or the committee about, and I can tell you that we’ve laid out the issues in the capital plan, and we have got all the projects that we have on our to-do list laid out. We deal with issues as they occur. The $55 million for fires, the $20 million for the rate rider, the $40 million because of the project in Inuvik is going ahead and hopefully at a faster pace than was anticipated and we want to keep it going.
We also do have resources built into our fiscal framework to resolve the issue with the Francophones and the schools in Yellowknife and Hay River. I would point out in Yellowknife we do have a situation that there is more classroom space than we have students. There are declining enrolments. We have three boards. We have more
school boards than makes sense, in my mind. There are inefficiencies. We have to figure out a way to put all that space to work and it’s tied into the money that’s available. So we have to have that discussion. We are hardly throwing money at capital. We fight hard, save hard, work hard to get every dollar we can so we can put infrastructure on the ground in all our communities.
The Stanton project is a big project. We have done a policy on P3. We are looking at setting up a P3 corporation building off of the work and concern and encouragement and direction from committee. While there may be questions about specifics, we have to look at this kind of approach because it allows us to do things we probably wouldn’t be able to do without that kind of partnership approach, the same as the approaches we are taking with the fibre optic line that allows us to put critical, economic infrastructure on the ground in a way that’s manageable and gives us an opportunity to make our dollars do the most work possible. Thank you.