Mahsi, Madam Speaker. I would like the residents of the Northwest Territories, especially the elderly and the sick, that I do care for their health and well-being. The issue here is: are we doing prudent spending on behalf of the people so that we can save dollars that can be used towards the small communities in terms of buying ventilation equipment, buying all of the necessary items that are required for PPE for all the COVID-related issues. With Alberta travellers coming into our territory, it's a big concern because we are on the highway system, my community. I have four communities on the highway system. We are seeing lots of traffic, and we have seen all summer Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec licence plates into our territory. I stated all this yesterday, and I just want to reiterate it today, that that shows that there are problems manning our border check stops. We are not doing a good job of that at all.

I think this COVID team has been in place since March. I spoke to it a length, too, stating that we have a workforce of close to 6,000 people, 6,000 employees within the Government of the Northwest Territories. I suggested many times to the Premier and Cabinet that we should have used people from our own workforce, which would have saved us having to pay for benefits and compensation for 150 new people. That would have been significant savings. The federal government has contributed $24 million, 23.4, to the GNWT for COVID. I would like to call it a task force. It should have been called a task force, probably. I suggested that they use that, those federal dollars, for this task force and not have to touch the GNWT taxpayers' dollars. That can go to much-needed complements, as I mentioned at the start of my speech.

Also, I noted that it's recorded that the Finance Minister could not assure this House that we would get success, I mean the funding continuing for every successive year. There was no indication of that. It could be a one-time funding pot, but they are saying on that side of the House that of course the Prime Minister will throw money at it every chance he has. We do not know the future of the federal politics at this point, whether there is going to be a new election or whether they may change their tune. There could be some other emergency. This COVID is a serious, serious business, but we need to tighten up our actions, and we should have done it with this secretariat. We could have saved a lot of money. The GNWT, being the highest level of government in the Northwest Territories, has to show the people, the businesses, that we represent that we can take on and be prudent and fiscally responsible in our spending.

There are lots of news reports out there on social media about our isolation centres. That is another big catastrophe since day one. We are well into November. Since March, November now, nothing has improved with those isolation centres. There are still lots of people walking, walking away from the centres, stories of people partying all night. They got free places to stay to party. That has not been fixed. We are finding that there are a lot of problems, still. We have got a team in place since March, and we have not made any headway. We keep saying, Cabinet keeps saying, that we are making headway, but I did not see anything.

We should have had all the residents who return, even from medical, who are in the isolation centres to get tested, not the rapid testing. I am not a big fan of an instant test because it's been shown to fail in some instances because, six days later, symptoms can appear. I am a fan of the lab testing that takes about five days, maybe less, but you can send it out to different labs if you looked around and found them. Then we could have had, we could have shortened isolation stay for many residents if we were to do that, but no, no, we don't want to do that. We want to show the people of the NWT that we've got money to play with.

When I first come into this Assembly here, we were already at a debt level. We need to thank the federal government for raising it from 1.3 to 1.9. It was mentioned yesterday, one forest fire in the summer will wipe out our debt level again, and we are in financial trouble. It's just the way the government spends. Cabinet spends on that side of the House without real consultation with Regular Members on this side of the House, who represent many of the residents of the Northwest Territories. Madam Speaker, having said that, I support all the other items on there. It's just the COVID secretariat that is stuck in there, so I have to vote against this bill. Mahsi.