Thanks, Madam Chair. I concur with everything that my colleague from Yellowknife Centre has said, because I was in the last Assembly, and I disagreed with this priority when we were talking about it. I made no bones whatsoever about that, and I continue to think that it's very misleading to the public to say that we are going to continue to work on these three. We cannot afford them all at the same time.
The Premier and Minister said that we don't have any cost figures for these. After the Minister of Finance said in a supplementary appropriation, when I was asking what the cost of Slave Geological Province road is, that she didn't know, I went on the ITI website. Lo and behold, March 2019, there's an economic study done of the Slave Geological Province road. The cost, as provided by ITI, $1 billion. One billion dollars. When you look at some of the other interesting information in the study, most of the jobs are going to go to the South. Even during the engineering planning phase, 66 percent of the jobs, that's the assumption, are going to go south. Even if you get this through and there's mines that produced, 50 percent of the jobs are going to go south. That's what happens now with the diamond mines. Nothing is going to change. These jobs are not going to stay here in the North. We don't have the labour force to build this or operate it, and even do the mining, and fully benefit from this. I don't understand why we're leading people on and saying that we are going to get this work done. We don't have the fiscal capacity.
My question for the Premier is, I want to make sure that the kind of analysis that this government is going to do is going to include alternative economic development scenarios. For the cost of the Slave Geological Province road, we could get all of our housing out of core need. That's $500 million. That's what the study from the last Assembly said. $500 million to get all of our housing out of core need, plus we could get 20 years of universal childcare. It's a no-brainer for me which one I'm going to pick. I want to get our housing out of core need, and I want 20 years of universal childcare for a billion dollars. That's my priority.
Is our government going to do the macroeconomic analysis and compare different kinds of scenarios for the number of jobs that are going to be created, whether the jobs stay here, what the economic spinoffs are going to be? That's the kind of information I want. I don't want just business cases for these three projects, because I think they're quite unaffordable, and the benefits are not going to stay here. My question again to the Premier is: are we going to see economic analysis of other kinds of investments that we can and should be making as a government? Thanks.