Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a few comments. I made some last week, and I will repeat some of them because I think they bear repeating, and there are a few other things about the budget that I would just like to highlight.
I said last week that I am quite concerned that we are going to spend ourselves into a corner, into hot water, I think I said last week. We seem to produce money out of thin air sometimes. Admittedly, we can borrow money, but borrowing costs money, and at some point in time – and we’ve been talking about this for a number of years and we don’t seem to achieve it – we have to get our revenues to equal our expenditures, and we’re not doing that. We keep spending. We get a little bit more money from the federal government and we spend it. We have done very little, in my mind, to reduce our expenditures.
Passive restraint has been something which the government has been using as sort of a cost-saving measure for the last several years, and I don’t think it has been all that effective. As an example, not necessarily in terms of spending but from the time that we discussed the business plans in the fall and to the time that we see the numbers in the budget that we have before us, there was an increase of, I forget now what the number was, but it was a fairly large increase in our budget, many millions of dollars. It seems that whenever the government needs to spend money, they just kind of find it. We, unfortunately, on this side of the House, though,
when we want to spend money, there’s never any money available. I have a bit of a difficulty with that contradiction where no, we have no money to spend when talking to Regular Members but then if the government needs money, well, they just find it, and I think we need to rein in that kind of thinking.
Although it’s a capital project, I am concerned about the Stanton Hospital Renovation and Renewal Project. It’s going to be a huge drain on our resources. It’s some $35 million a year, and I can’t remember the length of the contract. If we do a P3 project, it’s going to be a huge drawdown every year for many, many years. I think there is a need for us to consider whether or not a P3 is the right way to go. I’ve mentioned this before, but I feel it needs mentioning again because that $35 million a year amount that we’re going to have to pay, that’s going to be in our operations budget in the future. I think it probably is going to be cheaper for us to do it ourselves. I realize that there are issues with that because we don’t have the borrowing room in order to borrow, but I think we have to seriously consider whether or not a P3 is the right way to go. I don’t think that it is. I think there are an awful lot of examples of P3 projects, particularly involving hospitals, which have not been all that positive.
I see that this budget doesn’t address the need for alternative energy enough. I know there’s some money in here to develop alternative energy projects and to look at it, but I don’t think it’s enough, and I think we have to be spending far more. We should put a greater priority and should be spending far more time and energies on energy. One of the things which drive me crazy is that some six years ago now, I think, there was a trip to Europe. Members came back and said that district biomass heating systems, heat and power systems were in use in Europe, they were readily available and that they would adapt quite easily to the North. We have yet to see one in the North, and there is absolutely no reason why we could not have in the past six years developed a pilot project.
I am glad to see that we have started to record environmental liabilities in a financial sense. We’ve started, but I think we have a long way to go and I don’t think we have yet, in our budget, reached the appropriate number to properly handle environmental liabilities. I don’t think we know. I know we don’t know because we haven’t been able to monitor all the sites yet, but I don’t think we have any idea of how much the environmental liabilities are that we’re going to be on the hook for and that’s pretty important.
I am particularly concerned about junior kindergarten and the fact that there is no new money in this budget for junior kindergarten. I think it’s an unfair drain on the larger school authorities and school districts. If we’re going to put a new program in place, if it’s going to be a new initiative,
then we ought to fund it properly, and we’re not doing that.
Lastly, I wanted to just comment on, sort of, the perilous situation that we’re in, in regard to our land and the drought and the impending fire season, which is not all that far away, unfortunately. We could quite seriously be in the same situation in July and August that we were in in 2014; 2015 could be a repeat fire year. Again, it’s going to have an impact on our budget. It’s not something that we’ve budgeted for, so we’re going to be having extraordinary expenditures again, and it goes just to my view that we are planning but we’re not planning to meet our expenditures I guess. We’re not planning to reduce our expenditures; we’re not planning for a rainy day to a certain extent.
Two other things and then I’m done. One of them is the Minister has stated that we are going to have flat revenue growth. He has stated it quite often and I appreciate that. I know that our revenues go up and down and they are at the whim of forces that we can’t control. However, I think we need to spend; we need to put a lot more emphasis on finding a new revenue source than we do. We have for every year since I’ve been here said no, no new revenue source, no new taxes, no new levies, nothing. All we’ve done is to increase. I think we have increased the fees, we’ve increased our sin taxes and I think that’s about what we’ve done. Maybe put an increase of inflation on some of our fees for licences and so on. That’s not enough. We need a revenue source that is going to enable us to do the many big projects that we think we need to do.
Lastly, I mentioned last week and I have to mention it again, and that’s the strategy or the plan by the government to bring new residents into the territory. We have yet to see any evidence of that strategy on paper. The Minister has talked about it a number of times, there have been questions; however, I haven’t seen anything. If there is something on paper, if there’s a strategy that we can look at I certainly would love to see it as I think other Members would like to see it as well. So it concerns me that we are “doing stuff” as the Minister stated in answer to some questions last week, but it just sounds like talking into the wind and I have yet to see any concrete evidence that what the government is doing is going to pan out and get us more residents. So I’d love to see what the plan is for the next four years, apart from what we’ve done in the last year. I want to know what we’re going to be doing as we go ahead.
So, some comments, Madam Chair. I think that’s it. Thank you very much.