Thank you, committee. Please return to page 127 for the total department. Oh, thank you, committee. There are two information items related to the liquor revolving fund on pages 148 and 149. Is there anything further to the liquor revolving fund, beyond what we discussed in the activity? No agreement is required for an information item, so I will return to page 127. Mr. Testart.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I neglected to ask about the NWT Child Benefit, so in the department total I'll just ask some questions about this.

So this is a new change that's coming forward again with the passage of a piece of legislation that is currently with committee at second reading in this House, and it will increase the benefits payable through the fund or, sorry, through the credit. How many families are going to benefit from the enhanced NWT child benefit? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Testart. Mr. Stewart.

Thank you, Mr. Stewart. Mr. Testart.

Currently how many families receive the benefit?

Thank you, Mr. Testart. Mr. Stewart.

Thank you. Mr. Testart.

How many families are currently receiving the benefit under the current structure of the benefit? Thank you

Thank you, Mr. Testart. Mr. Stewart.

Thank you, Mr. Stewart. Mr. Testart.

Thank you. I appreciate that. Personally, the approximate numbers are fine at this point as we'll be doing more review of this.

So 1,000 more families are going to benefit from this. What is the average increase to the benefit that families can expect to enjoy once the changes are made? Thank you

Thank you, Mr. Testart. Minister

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, we don't have that detail of information handy. I will commit to the Member that we can put something in writing and provide it to all Members. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister. Mr. Testart.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That's satisfactory, but I will say this: this is a great idea, we've seen it be very successfully deployed on a national level, so I would encourage the Minister to both quantify how many more families this is going to benefit; the average costs that families will be able to gain monthly from this benefit or annually or whatever it shakes down to; and communicate that broadly with the public so they know exactly how much their government is giving back to them in the form of this NWT child benefit, and especially if you're doubling the amount of families who receive it. That's a very good thing. That’s just a comment, but I’m sure the Minister will be pleased to hear it’s not a criticism. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Testart. Would the Minister like to respond?

Sure. We appreciate the Member’s advice, and the Member is correct. I do agree with him that sometimes one of the criticisms of this government is we don’t tell the public a lot of the good stuff that we do. I think that needs to change. We will provide the information that Members have requested and provide it to committee. We will improve our communication of this as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister. Is there anything further from Mr. Testart? There is nothing further from Mr. Testart. Oh, I do have Mr. O’Reilly on my list.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I’m looking at page 128, which is the revenue summary. I see that Tobacco Tax revenues are $15.6 million; liquor revenues are $23.5 million. I add them up. Generally, it looks like about $39 million in revenues there from tobacco and liquor. Then I look at the net resource revenues that we get to keep from mining and oil and gas. That is found on Roman numeral xii of the main estimates. It looks like the amount that we actually get to keep from non-renewable resource revenue, so that is mining and oil and gas, is $13 million.

Look, I understand that 50 per cent of the non-renewable resource revenues go back to the feds and they claw that back through formula funding. We have to transfer some of the resource revenues to the Aboriginal governments, but my point here is we actually collect three times as much revenue from tobacco and liquor as we do from mining and oil and gas. That just doesn’t seem quite right to me.

Courtesy of the Chamber of Mines today, I find out that the value of mineral production in 2016 from the Northwest Territories was $1.276 billion. Something just doesn’t seem quite right here to me. Is the department willing to look at other forms of taxation that would allow us to capture more revenues from mining and oil and gas? Whether it’s a capital investment tax, a resource tax, what is it that we can do to try to retain more the benefits from oil and gas and mining and get the revenues from those activities? Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. O’Reilly. Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I’m not sure where the $13 million was. I was looking for it on the revenue page. I can say that the personal income tax of $113,276,000, I mean, you can attribute a lot of that to the folks who are working at the mines and then the corporate income tax; same thing. A lot of that is from the mine. The fuel tax; I mean, they would pay a lot of fuel tax. Payroll tax, $42 million. I’d like to know how much of that is from the mines. They do property tax as well. They pay property taxes.

If we were to do the work and add all these numbers up and see what indirectly we got from the mines, I think it’d be a lot more than $13 million. The Tobacco Tax, I’m sure there’s a few of them up there who have a cigarette now and then. They would pay into a Tobacco Tax. Every one of these, I think, has a link to the mining companies and the employees that are out. I take the Member’s point, and he makes it passionately, but we can’t be giving the impression that the $13 million quoted was the only revenue we got from the mines. Thank you, Mr. Chair.