Thank you, Mr. Chair. What we have before us today was we have a very modest capital budget of $210,000. Last year it was higher, but I’ll ask the deputy if he can speak to that in a little more detail. I can provide the detail for committee about the discrepancy from the actuals, the capital estimate to the revised estimates, but I don’t have that detail here with me.

What about the substantial drop from last year to the proposed year here? Do we have any information handy on that?

It reflects that fact that last year we had more capital projects on the go in Finance and this year we have dialed it back to the $210,000 that is here before the House for the two modules that we’ve talked about. I can also get the specifics of last year’s capital, if the Member wishes, and provide that to committee.

That’s all I had. I’ll look forward to that detail. It was the increase from the $450,000 to $1.031 million. A substantial increase there, 115 percent, roughly. I appreciate the Minister’s offer. That’s all I had for general comments.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Continuing on with general comments, I have Mrs. Groenewegen.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’ll be very brief. There’s been reference made in these general comments and this discussion to our revenues by way of our transfer payment, which is somewhat based on the population of our territory and our government’s desire to attract more people to live in the Northwest Territories to curb our declining population. My question, I guess, and comment for the Minister is, if you were listening to the debate and discussion amongst us about this at any given time, you would think that every potential job in the Northwest Territories was a Government of the Northwest Territories job. You would think that every job here was a public sector job. You wouldn’t think there was even a private sector here.

Also, when we’re talking about students and education and trying to flag students that are out taking education that might match up with positons or labour market shortages here in the Northwest Territories, again, it seems like all we talk about is Government of the Northwest Territories or public service positions.

I would like to ask the Minister, where does this government’s initiative to grow our population, where does it intersect or interface with the needs of the private sector?

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. Minister Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It’s a shared interest. The private sector, as well, is struggling, in many cases, to find staff and people and get people to stay to avoid having fly-in/fly-out, which is why we’ve started this working group with the Chamber of Mines, the Chamber of Commerce and the three diamond mines to talk about what can we do together, how do we work together. Things like going south jointly to go to trades fairs and those types of things. We’re working with our own departments, Education for example, to really take advantage of this Express Entry Program that the federal government is going to be rolling out in January where businesses, government, whoever has a need, can reach into work from another country, from another place and say I need an accountant or engineer or whatever professional or technical person you need and I will give them a job here, that there’s going to be a program that’s going to give within six months, apparently you should be able to get these folks from wherever they live to where they’re going to work, which in this case would be the Northwest Territories. We have a shared interest with the mines there, as well, because we all have vacancies and hard-to-fill positions that we’re working hard at. We want to work with them. As well, we’ve sorted out the confidentiality issue, for example, with Education where now we can have a greater connection with the students that we’re paying to go to school down south, not only for ourselves but for the private sector so they can know who is in engineering, who is in finance, who is in the social sciences and we can do a better job of recruiting and making sure our own students and our own children, Northerners, know that not only we’d like them to come back but we’re going to actively recruit them to come back. So we have a very shared common interest to see that we can have that type of sustainability and have that type of population growth where we share our efforts where it makes sense to do that work in terms of the systems and making sure that we can address our needs together. Thank you.

Thank you. I’d just like to thank the Minister for that comprehensive response, and that is good news and some of that I was not aware of, some of those initiatives that may be more recent. So, I’m sure the public will be glad to hear of them and that’s what this forum is all about. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. General comments. Does committee agree to go into detail?

Thank you, committee. Committee, if I can get you to turn your attention to your NWT Capital Estimates binder. We are currently on page 27, which we will defer. So again, committee, page 28, Finance. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just on the detail here, I’m just wondering if I can get a brief explanation of what an IT system to implement functionality within the treasury suite of applications to forecast cash requirements and manage portfolio investments means.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That was what we thought was fairly plain English, but I’ll ask the deputy to provide further detail.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Mr. Aumond.

Thank you, Mr. Aumond. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks for that response. I think it will be very interesting to have a discussion at some point on what our portfolio of investments is. This may not be the right forum for it, but it’s something I don’t recall. Perhaps our committee on Gov Ops has had that, but that might be an interesting discussion.

Just on the other project, I see it’s a completion of the implementation of the PeopleSoft financial…(inaudible)…sourcing and so on. Are we on budget with that? I don’t see a prior year expenditure on this, although I know we seem to invest untold millions into this software generally. Where are we at in achieving our targets with what was originally predicted for costs here with this SAM system and with this second project specifically? Thank you.

Thank you for that information. I heard that there will be the $50,000 cost and I believe the deputy minister said some additional going to this project from operations. Perhaps I should know that amount. Thank you.

So now this project is up to $225,000, putting those two figures together, and $175,000 being moved over from operations in ’15-16. I don’t know what our operations budget is, but is that the normal course for capital purchases? I know it is possible to transfer between, but I thought it was usually sort of a supplementary thing as opposed to 80 percent of the cost.