Thank you, Madam Chair. I’ll agree with the Member; he’s not totally negative. But the reality is, we are going into our fourth capital plan. We are going to be, in a few months, back before the Assembly with our final O and M budget. A lot of the concerns here today, even though we’re here to talk capital, are much broader, focused on the programs and services.

The government runs… It’s a business, a complex business, on the clear guidelines and principles that govern all public government institutions: accounting, reporting and public accounts and transparency. We have a very intense system with the MLAs that lay out the priorities. We have the debates about the budgets; we have approved three. At every budget address, I will concur with the Member, we have pointed out the fact that our O and M pressures are outstripping our ability to keep funding them.

We’ve held firm in terms of not putting any new money that we would get from resource revenue sharing in the programs and services because those revenues are very volatile. We need to beef up our debt repayment, the Heritage Fund and our infrastructure, and we already spend $1.6 billion out of $1.8 billion on programs and services. No matter how you want to look at it, the reality is, in spite of those challenges, the finances of this government pass muster from the Auditor General, from the finance people, from the credit rating agencies, from this House where we pass our budgets. Yes, the day is coming again and continues to come, but we’re going to, as we look at controlling our revenues and balancing those with our expenditures, the upward pressure on our O and M costs are absolutely consistently there, unrelenting and continue to drive a lot of our thinking.

As we lay out in our fiscal strategy, and we’ve said it again this time, and we’ve said it all my seven years now as Finance Minister, that this is a path that has a long-term trajectory that’s not sustainable unless we manage to have more control over our program spending. I agree with the Member on that. But there is very significant demand in the Northwest Territories and in this House, on the one hand, to manage our money and to do all these good things and grow the population, spend more money but manage your money, and be all things to all people, and it’s a balancing act that I think, for the most part, we as a government and a Legislature have managed to do.

A lot of things have changed since 2008, 2007, and we have yet to recover from that dramatic economic

shock, and we’re working on that. I don’t recollect devolution ever being held out as a financial panacea where all of a sudden we’d have no more fiscal problems. What it was is we would finally have control over decision-making on things that matter to us, that we would take over some of the functions of government, which we’ve done, and that we would take the amount of resource revenues, which we’ve always known were modest, and we would put those to use. I would suggest to you that there have been those benefits, because without that resource revenue sharing, we wouldn’t have any very significant investments in our Heritage Fund, for example, and we will put the money to use into our capital plan, $315 million for the year coming, which is not an unsubstantial amount of money of anybody’s measure.

We are managing to do an enormous amount of work. We’re doing the Tuk-Inuvik highway. We’re going to do the fibre optic link. We’re going to do the Stanton Hospital, $315 million. Yes, there are challenges to that, but as a government, what is our responsibility? Is it to invest in infrastructure or not? Is it to invest in critical economic infrastructure? Critical social infrastructure? Do we take on a mortgage of sort, a manageable mortgage to do that? There’s nobody in this room that I don’t think has ever managed to make it through their life without taking on a mortgage for critical big cost items. It’s how we’re supposed to do this business. It’s the only way we can.

I appreciate the stern advice and concern from the Member, and we’ll continue to do the work that we need to make sure that we can maintain our Aa1 credit rating and that we have the money we need to leave the coffers for the 18th Assembly in a

situation where they have some flexibility.