Thanks, Madam Chair. I think it's important that the public realize this is a very important debate that we are about to have. It's a debate about the future of the Northwest Territories. It's a debate about infrastructure projects and people.
What this motion is about is deleting from the supplement appropriations $10 million that has not been previously authorized for work on the Slave Geological Province road. I fully understand that this is 75 percent federal funding. I understand that this is part of a larger project and that the estimated costs are $1 billion or more to actually build the project. I raised numerous concerns about this in the last Assembly, around a whole variety of issues and matters, and I have talked about those with my colleagues when we were developing our priorities. I talked about it during the mandate, and I am talking again about it here today. We have to make hard decisions, and that is why people elect us to this House, is to make those kinds of decisions.
My position has always been clear, that I will put people over large infrastructure projects, investment in people over large infrastructure projects. I have always asked for detailed analyses of economic costs, benefits, and value for money around these infrastructure projects, and I have never gotten it. I understand that some of this expenditure may be for that work, but I think we need to have the debate and discussion now around whether this is the right path to start to go down and whether we want to continue to spend money developing this particular project. What we are being asked to do is authorize $2.5 million of our own money for next year, but that is just the beginning, where this is $10 million over four years.
In my view, the more time and effort that we continue to spend on this particular project, it takes away from work we can and should be doing on other projects, namely housing. That, to me, has always been one of my highest priorities. It's what I hear from my constituents. That is why I am here. By continuing to spend money on this project, it is taking away from our ability and efforts to do other projects, whether it's housing, whether it's healthcare, whether it's education. Unfortunately, we have never had, sort of, the analysis about, if we had $1 billion to spend, where would we get the biggest bang for our buck? What I do know is that the economic multipliers used by the Northwest Territories Bureau of Statistics will show you that investment in health and education creates way more jobs than investment in mining and non-renewable resource development. That's not me saying it; that's the Bureau of Statistics.
One of the reasons that I have expressed a lot of concern about this project is the state of the Bathurst caribou herd, and make no mistake about it, this road, as planned, will go through the range of the Bathurst caribou herd. The planning to date has been to maximize access to mineral deposits. I asked very clearly on the floor of the House how the routing was being designed, and so on. I was told that it was being done to maximize access to mineral resources. There has been no consideration whatsoever given to caribou and their habitat. We still don't have a fully funded plan to help the Bathurst caribou herd recover. I will say that we do have a range plan that has finally been approved; it has not been fully funded. I have kept asking on the floor of this House, "Where is the work on habitat protection?" That has not been done, and we need a much more balanced approach on that. Quite frankly, I would take the $2.5 million from this and spend it on other things, including habitat protection.
I think the other issue that this project raises is one of priorities, in terms of even our own infrastructure. In the last government, they had an opportunity to submit a number of projects to the National Trade Corridors program, including the Frank Channel Bridge. The previous Cabinet decided that the Slave Geological Province road was a higher priority than the Frank Channel Bridge. That, to me, Madam Chair, was the wrong set of priorities. I will always put public safety over a large infrastructure project. This money can and should have gone to do work on the Frank Channel Bridge.
I want to say one more thing about this, Madam Chair, and it comes from the economic analysis report that was done in March of last year by the Department of Infrastructure. It was not given to the MLAs of the day. We were not told about it, but it is available on the Department of Infrastructure website. The assumptions used were that, even during the engineering and professional services stage of this project, 66 percent of the labour work to be done is going to be imported. Even the $2.5 million that we're going to put in here, two thirds of that is not going to stay in the Northwest Territories; it's going to go elsewhere. At no stage in the Slave Geological Province road, from design, construction, right to actual mining, will any more than 50 percent of those jobs actually stay in the Northwest Territories. If we spend a billion dollars on housing, I would tell you that a lot more of those jobs would stay in the Northwest Territories; or on health, education, you name it. Those are the kinds of priorities that I came here with.
Lastly, I want to say, Madam Chair, that I just simply believe that we cannot afford to build this project, even if it was the right thing to do. We cannot afford it as a government. We're very close to the debt wall. This would require extraordinary borrowing or increasing our borrowing limit. I just don't think that we can afford this, nor can we afford to do three infrastructure projects, the big three, at the same time. I think we are fooling ourselves, we're fooling the people of the Northwest Territories, if we continue to try to tell them that we're going to do these three large infrastructure projects all at the same time.
Madam Chair, this is a very, very important debate that we are about to have, and it's the first time that we have had this debate in public about what our priorities are going to be, moving forward, as a government and about this particular project. I encourage all of my colleagues to think carefully about what they're going to say and where they want to stand on this issue. Madam Chair, I request a recorded vote. Mahsi.