Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We came into this Assembly and we had a pretty tight fiscal situation, and so I have a dream. I have a dream of leaving the next Assembly $100 million of room in their debt ceiling. Enough to pay for a bad forest fire season or a flood but probably not both, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, we are on track to spend more money than any Assembly in history. We are on track to also add more debt than any Assembly in history. This budget is worth $500 million, Mr. Speaker.
And, you know, I actually have very little issue with the individual projects in here. You know, an NWT budget has never been voted down in the history of the Assembly. We are very much a rubber stamp institution when it comes to budgets. Sometimes some small changes are made in O and M but, in many ways, capital is the one thing people agree on. It creates jobs. It builds the economy. I understand the tendency to want to spend $500 million here. However, I think we have to understand how the capital budget works. It is a snapshot in time.
We are actually spending, when you total up all over the projects, well over $2 billion here, Mr. Speaker. This specific capital budget is about 40 percent funded by the GNWT, 60 percent by the federal government. That is good. But when you add up, there's some math I just cannot understand. I have tried, with the publicly available numbers here, but no matter how I crunch the numbers we are set to exceed our debt ceiling with the capital we are planning let alone other major infrastructure projects, let alone operations and maintenance.
Mr. Speaker, there's a couple things I want to speak to but one is my frustration with what is publicly available out there.
We all, in this House, have a copy of the acquisition plan. It can tell you the individual price of projects and what we're doing in future years. That's not a publicly available document so I can't actually speak to specific numbers of projects. But I would like the GNWT, just for one week, to try and operate with what is publicly available, and I think we would fix our transparency problem. If you go over to Yukon for instance, you can see their five-year acquisition plan. Every single project has the range of what they expect to spend on it. Every single project is then tracked and reported on once it is concluded. We asked our staff to try and track a project through the years in the capital budget, and it's next to an impossible task to tell you what the total cost actually comes out. Add on the fact that we often get sued and then settle with contractors, it's an even more impossible task to tell you what something actually ends up costing in the public accounting.
Now, Mr. Speaker, I think it needs to be clear that this capital budget means a cut to programs and services. That is what we are voting for today.
Down south, you could argue that there is an option to increase revenue. I don't think that is on the table in the Northwest Territories. We are not getting $500 million out of our citizens through taxes any time soon.
The extent to which it actually costs in the O and M is a question the Department of Finance could not answer with any clarity. I get it is a complicated question but the disconnect between our capital budget and our O and M budget leads us to, once again, math that simply does not add up to me, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, I want to admit that I will be voting against this capital budget but I am a relatively cheap vote. I would have voted for this capital budget with five more million dollars in housing, permanent long-term funding for our housing infrastructure.
We heard the other day they have a $1 billion backlog in infrastructure. They spend $10 million a year, Mr. Speaker. At that rate, in a hundred years they will have got to their infrastructure backlog and we build houses to last about 40 years, Mr. Speaker. The math does not add up.
Mr. Speaker, this budget is also taking $2.5 million away from our communities. Priorities throughout this Assembly have been housing. People have to have a roof over their heads and our communities, the foundation of our society, have to be strong. This budget is actually removing capital money from our communities who are stretched so thin you can see through them.
Mr. Speaker, if those two things were to happen, you know, less than a half a percent of this total budget, I probably would have voted in favour but we could not even get an increase to the housing capital which is, in this specific budget, building zero new houses; or, our community infrastructure which, in this case, is actually removing $2.5 million.
Mr. Speaker, we know that we spend over $68 million a year on our roads, and we've heard from the Minister that is not nearly enough. We know that the breakdown costs for our deferred maintenance is $465 million. We allocate $5 million a year for deferred maintenance. That would take 90 years to catch up on our deferred maintenance backlog. At that point, every single asset in our portfolio would have to also be rebuilt. The math is not adding up. We are not maintaining what we have in any state.
We have an absolutely terrible track record of maintaining what we have, and I think it is very tempting to build new things. But until that math is there and until that responsibility is there, I believe we are setting future Assemblies and future generations up for failure to have more crumbling infrastructure.
This budget does not even get into the power corporation, which we know also needs billions of dollars to keep its infrastructure in a state where they can continue to provide power to the people of the Northwest Territories, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, I know that this budget then builds certain human infrastructure and a great example is long-term care beds. We all know we need those long-term care facilities. But I still don't have a clear explanation on how we're going to afford them. Each of those beds costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to operate. We know there is a $120 million deficit in our health care system. And the department has committed to a stabilization plan which, to me, is actually just a vague term to meaning cuts to a health care system right now that is being held together with glue and strings and losing nurses at such a fast rate. So on one hand, we are asking our health authority to, you know, add tens of millions of dollars to their budget through long-term care. On the other hand, we are asking them to do a deficit reduction. Mr. Speaker, I believe that the fair conclusion there is that our health system is actually underfunded and perhaps the priority of this Assembly just has to be offer basic health care to people, Mr. Speaker. I am concerned we are on a path where that will be very impossible to do within our fiscal capacity.
Mr. Speaker, there are so many priorities in this House, and I don't think the hard work has been done to prioritize the capital.
I can't tell you how much the school in Colville Lake is going to cost; that's not a figure I'm allowed to say; that's not a figure the Minister will say publicly; but I believe that if we run the math on building a school of that size in Colville Lake, and we apply to all of the schools we need to build, we come to a number that is actually impossible. It's impossible to build schools of that scale in all of our communities, Mr. Speaker. I don't see how this math is adding up, and I don't have the public information to conclude that.
In this capital budget, we are building a line to Whati. I don't have a lot of issues to this project but I think this project makes the most sense if Fortune Minerals signs into a long-term power purchasing agreement and actually buys some power from us. That is about the only way we could justify the expense of this project. I know it's a goal to get communities off hydro. That is something I would like to see but I am being asked to vote for a transmission line without being told the total cost of it, without knowing whether we are actually going to sell power to Fortune Minerals, and without knowing the root of it.
I believe there is something going on where the Department of Infrastructure gets its money into the capital budget far easier than any program or service. I would really like to see the success rate of infrastructure going to FMB for those communities.
In this capital budget is money for community hydro. Apparently, we got it out of ICIP funding. Great. When asked about it, the Minister didn't even know what community it was going in. We are spending tens of millions of dollars and we don't even know where it's going yet. I don't understand how that gets through ICIP, how that gets through FMB, and how it now puts a tens-of-million-dollar obligation on our budget without even knowing which community it is in, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, that's not to say I don't support those projects. That's not to say I don't support community hydro. I would just like to see a bit more due diligence in connecting the capital budget to operations and management to an overall plan for our fiscal stability. I expect, and I hope, the next operations budget starts to make some cuts. There is at least $50 million in that budget I believe I could find to get us on a path. This budget is inherently linked being connected to the operations budget -- maintenance budget. I do not know what is planned for the next O and M budget but I suspect it is a status quo budget that will take us right up to our debt ceiling and well beyond that and put our next Assembly in the very difficult position of, day one, making hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts, Mr. Speaker.
I would like to see a meaningful plan with our Power Corp. I would like to see a meaningful plan with what is going on with our community infrastructure deficit, our own infrastructure deficit, our road infrastructure deficit. I believe we need to start maintaining what we have before we look into building more.
Mr. Speaker, I believe $500 million could be better spent. It could be better spent making sure our citizens have roofs over their heads and our communities have infrastructure. They have roads and sewer and recreational facilities that work, and they can provide a strong sense of community. I believe that is our priority. I believe it's insulting to pass this budget that builds zero new houses for the Housing Corp and actually takes money away from our communities, yet passes the single largest capital budget in GNWT history. And for that reason, I don't believe the work has been done, or the due diligence by this Cabinet, to actually take us where we need to be and I will be voting against this budget. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.