That was my same questioning along those lines is with the Association of Municipalities. We got together last night and obviously they’re concerned with some of the way this capital budget seems to be locked in forever. Obviously, they are seeing pressures. Obviously, the cost of living is going up, the cost of contracting. I would assume that that number is probably light at $24 million. I know Hay River has a lot of infrastructure pressure
right now, and that’s not only
w
hat they’re using currently with our funding, but gas
tax money and they’re still seeing deficits and it’s going to take them probably 10 or 15 years. They could probably just about eat up this whole budget and not touch the whole deficit that they have.
The bigger communities are seeing more and more people coming there. There are more and more regional pressures from different communities. I think we need to really strongly look at this as a funding arrangement and how we deal with the regional centres that are seeing pressures. We have a lot of people who come from outside the community. We appreciate that for the economy, but a lot of our facilities and infrastructure are used by
those people. Not only our physical structures and physical buildings but our emergency services and all that type of stuff, medical services. We have a whole bunch of pressures from the surrounding area and I would assume similar to regional centres throughout the territory.
Like my colleagues, I’d like to stress that we can’t lock this in. There has to be at least a CPI index to that to get to some point where we’re seeing an increase to it, because at these levels the communities are going to keep falling farther and farther behind and it gets more and more burdensome on the taxpayers
and it’s not
necessarily fair because not all the usage is being done just by the taxpayers. I’m not sure if in the review they actually looked at that regional concept of regional usages. Can the Minister indicate to me whether they did that?