Thank you, Mr. Speaker. On November 18th I attended the budget dialogue in

Inuvik where various concerns and recommendations were brought to the government in the Minister of Finance’s budget dialogue tour across the Northwest Territories. There was a big discussion around investment in renewable energy, and obviously Inuvik is going through a gas situation, and that was one of the big topics, and I’m glad to see that it was also reiterated in other regions with the high cost of living and energy that was put into the Taking Stock Budget Dialogue.

This government is working on, right now, passing a $1.6 billion budget. There is a big increase in the wages and the benefits that we do supply our employees. When I was going through the budget dialogues for the last three years, in 2012 one of the things that I noticed in the overarching themes was mention of duplication of programs. We do

have organizations in the Northwest Territories that do programs on behalf of government and do really great work that help residents become healthier, become educated, become part of society, yet we still do some of those programs within our departments.

Yesterday, during some of our dialogue with one of the departments, we got around to talking about the Third-Party Accountability Framework and how this government is increasing the budget of two not-for-profit organizations in the Northwest Territories who do work on behalf of government, and found out that under this accountability framework the department actually went out and worked with these organizations to increase their wages and benefits, like we do with the employees for the Government of the Northwest Territories.

We still have numerous other not-for-profit organizations that have been running on the same budgets, the same wages and same salaries for years.

I will ask question to the Premier of this government on what he’s going to do to ensure that all not-for-profit organizations do come up to speed with the economy that we’re dealing with right now. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.