Thanks, Madam Chair. I appreciate the commitment from the Minister and as much as I would like to see it, I think the public also needs to see this. So I'll take her commitment there.
I do want to make some remarks now. I do want to compliment the Minister for the new approach, limiting capital spending to the $260 million cap that I think better reflects our ability to actually get money out the door. And I know that the department is also doing much better tracking of the reasons for carryovers and can then, you know, work towards trying to look at what the barriers are and how to change that. And I know that they've also got a procurement review underway which might allow us to do some of this work more quickly and retain more of the benefits.
But, Madam Chair, I'm going to take some of the credit, and I think the Regular MLAs are going to take some of the credit for this new capital approach, which the Minister made her statement yesterday in the House about this, when she tabled them. We have been on the Minister, as Regular MLAs, for the entire Assembly about the overbudgeting, the overspending on capital, overspending that I've raised, certainly overbudgeting and the amount of carryovers. So, you know, I have not voted in favour of a single capital budget in this Assembly, and I have raised these issues again and again and again. So I want to thank the Minister for listening and actually decreasing the envelope or putting a cap on capital spending. So that's the good news. The bad news is I still think you're spending on the wrong priorities. And all I have to do is turn to page 2 here, and the largest single key investment area in the entire budget, the highest amount, 30 percent on highways and roads. Why are we not spending 30 percent of our budget on housing? That should be the highest priority for this Assembly, not highways and roads in terms of capital investment. And it's no secret that I have never accepted a number of the large infrastructure projects as priorities. The Slave Geological Province Road -- I shouldn't have used that word -- is not a priority, especially at a time when the Bathurst caribou herd is in decline and a regional study is being discussed; we should not be spending money on something like that. I also disagree with Taltson Expansion. I don't think there's no buyer that's been identified. Without a buyer, there's no project. And I think we can make much better use of the funds that would be invested in that project to build community and individual homeowner energy self-sufficiency.
So I disagree fundamentally with Cabinet's spending priorities and as shown here, highways and roads highest item. So I will likely still vote against this budget but I want to thank the Minister for her efforts to decrease the overbudgeting on capital. Thanks, Madam Chair.