Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I rise with the opportunity to talk about the cost of living as well. What’s important to say is I remember the days when people talked about families with one paycheque. I can’t remember how long ago that was. Any family with one paycheque must be an amazing money manager to this day. Because I will tell you, nowadays two paycheque families are having a tough go at it just getting through their day to day.

As always, I want to give thanks to my favorite champions out there in the government, that’s called the Bureau of Stats, because they have provided me these facts that I will remind the government of. So I can say that in 2014, August that has just passed, 22,200 were employed. Out of almost 32,000 residents that would be normally working, that is still a terrible number. But what is ironic about this is about a 1,500 dip from 2013. My colleague Ms. Bisaro just pointed on the area that I really wanted to narrow in on, the northern residents tax deduction.

You can have all the tax breaks in the world, they can give you anything they want, but the fact is they are useless if you don’t make any money. All tax breaks do is just make people feel good, but if you

don’t have a paycheque, you have nothing to deduct it against.

It has been years since the federal government even acknowledged our northern tax deduction under a residency issue and they bumped it up ever so slightly. As it stands today, it is approximately $16.50 per person per day. That goes down a complicated taxation line which I will stay out of, but the fact is the person can claim up to $6,222 a year. Again, that’s only useful as a deduction if you have a paycheque. Again, families with a single paycheque, how they do it, I don’t know. Two family paycheques are struggling through.

What is time, and certainly necessary in this particular occasion, is that our Premier should be furious about how low it is. It has not kept pace with the cost of living, it has not been indexed in any way, and at this point it is more of an annoyance to fill out on your tax form than it certainly is seen as a benefit.

I encourage our Premier to start getting a little fury and fight back on this stuff. Now he should probably be joining arms with our sister territories and fighting Ottawa about this broken system. An everyday family needs a break, not to be broken the way it is being treated through this cost of living process.

I look forward to the Premier finally doing something on this very important issue. Thank you.