Thank you, Madam Chair. I guess, in general, I support the new approach taken in these capital estimates to, you know, reduce the amount to what we were actually going to spend, and I note this has freed up quite a bit of room in our debt ceiling because we are not committed to borrowing the money for projects that, you know, seem to be completely behind schedule for a variety of reasons. But I just want to talk about the lack of information that I think is currently around all of our infrastructure and I believe it is information that would best be provided when we deal with the capital budget. For example, we don't know what our current infrastructure deficit is in the Northwest Territories other than it is far more money that we can afford. We don't publicly know what our five-year capital plan is and what projects we're building in the next five years. I suspect that document exists, but it is not a public document. We don't know how much specific projects are going to cost. You will hear me ask this a number of times as we review this, what is this road going to cost? What is this school going to cost? Also, not public information, and we are expected to approve that money over the coming days without actually being told that figure publicly.
The capital estimates don't provide an update on our deferred maintenance backlog other than we know it is also hundreds of millions of dollars that our assets are in need of desperate repair, and we consistently underfund repairing our assets.
I really believe we have, as the GNWT, have not done proper asset management. We have no idea of where or at what state all our assets are in and what's need of repair they are in other than we know it's hundreds of millions of dollars.
Getting into the weeds a little bit, I think it would be prudent to report how many of our assets have reached zero book value. And what I mean by that is that every time we build something, we amortize it over the expected life cycle and I'm quite confident that the vast majority of our assets have reached zero book value, which would imply we're supposed to replace them but that's probably hundreds of millions of dollars that we also do not have to replace our infrastructure.
All around, we table this capital document and we get excited that we're going to spend a couple hundred million dollars building new things, but we don't really talk about the fact that we have billions of dollars of infrastructure across, you know, the government and, most importantly, probably the Power Corp has another couple billion dollars in need of replacement. If we look at the state of all our hydro, many of it, you know, long, long overdue for replacement. And none of that information comes with the capital budget. So we are asked to add more infrastructure to an ever-growing infrastructure deficit and an ever-growing maintenance backlog.
I know some work is being done on this, but ultimately I think you can look at a number of jurisdictions that publish much more detailed analysis of all their assets, all their infrastructure, much more detailed analysis of what they're building over the next 5, 10, 20 years with costing that is all public. That is not something we do. And I will have a number of questions on that, to make that information public, as we go through these capital estimates. Thank you, Madam Chair.