Thanks, Madam Chair, and I want to thank the Minister for that response. I guess I have a few comments I want to offer. I want to echo some of the frustration of my colleagues here this evening. Not a lot of this is actually new. The request, though, certainly for a $135-million increase in short-term borrowing is something new, and it comes at a difficult time, at the beginning of this Assembly. I have asked questions in the last Assembly about the deficit for the Northwest Territories Health and Social Services authority. If you look at their annual report, the latest one that is available, the deficit is $117 million if you look at note 6. That is what is driving part of this. This is a result of chronic underfunding by our government, of the Health and Social Services authority, across all of the departments or all of the regions. This is an accumulated deficit over time, chronic underfunding to health and social services. That is partly to blame here, in my opinion, Madam Chair.

Infrastructure spending, we took on way too many large infrastructure projects in the last Assembly. That is what is driving our budget now, the federal money, the 75-cent dollars, and we are going to get caught in the same trap again. We are going to see these cash-flow problems only increase in this Assembly. That is a little bit of a warning, a heads-up. It is a major concern for me with large infrastructure projects.

I had also heard the Minister say that the corporate taxes were not as predicted and that, at the end of this year, they are going to be in a negative position with regard to corporate taxes. Corporate taxes are a terrible way to try to capture revenues from non-renewable resource development, and I have been on record saying that for decades, as a resident, to previous finance Ministers. If we want to actually capture non-renewable resource development benefits and money back to this government, we need a resource tax or an increase to the royalties. Corporate taxation just doesn't do it, and it goes up and down like a yo-yo, and that is partly why we are in this problem in the first place, now.

I am surprised to hear at this point that we are actually going to be staffing a position to help us with cash flow. I would have thought that that is just a basic thing that any Department of Finance would actually already have in place so that we could avoid this kind of problem in the first place. If you don't have somebody who is watching the cash flow and making sure the money comes in on time, we are in a desperate situation here. I am glad to hear that that is going to get addressed. I don't blame this Minister; she is brand new. However, there are some serious problems here with the way that we have been running our finances for many years, and this is coming to light. This highlights a lot of these issues. These issues are going to come back in the next budget, so I am willing to let this one go, but these are systemic problems that we have to address in the next budget. We have to find more money coming in here, more prediction and reliability with that money coming into the Northwest Territories. We have to make better efforts to collect debts and get them on time. We have to stop the chronic underfunding of our healthcare system. These are things that are going to crunch us in terms of our ability to take on new initiatives, as well.

Sorry, that is a mouthful from me, but I am very frustrated with this, as I think most of the Members on this side of the House are, and many of these issues should have been addressed by the last Assembly. I tried to do some of that, but now we are here again. The very first thing we've got to do is approve a short-term borrowing limit increase by $135 million; this is not a good place to start off. Thanks, Madam Chair.