Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Member commented about the millions that we’ve spent, and we have, since the last government. In the last government I think we earmarked about $60 million, and this government has continued to spend additional millions on things like biomass, solar, wind, looking at other alternatives, energy conservation. We’ve spent money probing out the issues tied to the connecting of the Taltson grid and the Snare system with an intertie to the south. We took the approach that if we created a market for biomass, which we have done both with our own facilities and with the public through the rebates and incentives that we’ve put there for people to take advantage of, plus benefiting from the high cost of fuel which has given people an even greater incentive, that once we built that market we would build an industry, and we are in the critical final stages for us to be working with Aurora Pellets to conclude the agreements that are necessary to allow the development of a biomass industry in the Northwest Territories that will meet the energy needs on a biomass basis for the Northwest Territories, and that’s a $20 million project. It’s going to bring jobs. It’s going to bring all sorts of affordable energy to people in the Northwest Territories. We continue to look at things, net metering, standby charges as it comes to solar, the charrette that we’re coming up with in November. As the Premier indicated, he is going to allow us to focus not on the transmission side, which is too expensive at present, but on the generation issues and options that are there and the need to continue to invest, as a government, in that type of area. We’ve heard it now clearly across the Northwest Territories and in this House. The cost of living, energy is one of our biggest costs. We can’t turn our backs on a need to invest in energy. We’re going to, in fact, continue to invest, hopefully, even greater amounts to deal with some of these critical issues.
The Member made a comment about the impact on our fiscal strategy, and yes, as we reported to Cabinet, these issues like the fires, like the rate rider, to name two, have an impact on our fiscal strategy, but we still have built in the flexibility to manage those, though we are now slightly under the $100 million cushion that we had set for ourselves. The job of government is to respond both to what is planned and things that happen that we may not necessarily control, and by dint of our hard work collectively in terms of fiscal discipline, we’ve built in that flexibility, and I can assure the Member that all our decisions are made very clearly looking closely and constantly at our fiscal strategy, our borrowing room, long-term impacts, how do we
manage all these things, all these various demands.
The Member says we should raise taxes, don’t spend so much on economic infrastructure, continue to invest more in programs and services. To me, it’s something of a conflicting message. We need to invest in economic infrastructure. I think we’ve got a lot of money of our $300 million plus the Stanton Hospital and the fibre optic line that are not roads, but I could make the strong case on the fibre optic line that it has huge impacts on education and health among other things. But we need to hit that balance. We can’t turn our back on the need for economic infrastructure. We rely on our territorial formula funding to be sure, but we still generate 25 percent or so of our own revenue.
The world is still in very shaky economic times, and increasing the tax burden at this time, as we’ve said in previous government, is not a time to add to that burden when we know that there are other things we can do to manage our way through this, and if we want to, in fact, incent people to come here, businesses and people, and we want to affect the cost of living, increasing our tax burden on people that live here seems to be somewhat counterintuitive.
Why did we keep up with the capital plan of $50 million? Why did we not just cut it back? We laid out a plan four years ago. We revisit it every year, and there was no indication from anybody or committee, any committee, that said we think we should cut the capital plan by $50 million. We would have had a very interesting discussion about that, but that was never raised as an issue. We all agreed with the plan. We had done the work to make it a reality and we are following through on that.
The issue of the Stanton P3, we can have those discussions. There have been discussions now for years with committee about P3s and Stanton, and we’ve charted out a path that allows us to, in fact, get that done and expand Stanton by 40 percent and upgrade the rest of it to 21st Century standards,
and we’ve got to do it in a way that’s fiscally manageable.
I’ll leave the detailed questions on housing in regard to seniors and public housing for especially singles, as the Member pointed out, to our Minister McLeod. I would point out, though, that we’re still continuing to deal with the very significant pressures of the declining CMHC investment in the Northwest Territories and across Canada in public housing.
We have indicated that for the $40 million for the Tuk-Inuvik highway that that’s part of the project that has already been laid out. There’s a need, just for the sake of erring on the side of caution, increasing our $275 million limit to $300 million so that we can cover that off, even though we believe we can do it with the existing limit but then we’d
have no flexibility at that point for short-term borrowing, which means it will be paid off as soon as April 1st hits and the budget is approved.
Our borrowing limit right now, the discussions are still proceeding with the federal government. With the $800 million borrowing limit, we’re slightly less than $100 million that we were keeping as a cushion to give us maximum flexibility for unexpected events.