Thank you, committee. We will take a short recess and resume with the first item.

---SHORT RECESS

I now call Committee of the Whole back to order. Committee, we've agreed to consider Tabled Document 723-19(2), Capital Estimates 2023-2024. Does the Minister of Finance have any opening remarks?

Yes, thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I am happy to present the GNWT's 2023-2024 Capital Estimates.

These capital estimates total $328 million to support and continue infrastructure investment in our communities. Major highlights of the plan include:

• $95.1 million for highways, winter roads, bridges and culverts. This includes funding of $13.4 million for the Frank Channel Bridge, $12 million for the Prohibition Creek Access Road, $19.8 million for the advancement of the environmental and planning work for the Mackenzie Valley and Slave Geologic Province All-Season roads;
• $45 million for various airport and runway projects under the Disaster Mitigation Adaption Fund, Investing in Canada Infrastructure Plan, and the Department of National Defence; and
• $42.9 million for renewable energy projects, including $18 million for the Fort Providence Transmission Line, and $6.7 million for planning the expansion of Taltson Hydro Electric System;
• $32.6 million for planning and construction of long-term care facilities, health centres, improvements to health information systems services, biomedical equipment, including $11.6 million for the health centre in Tulita and $10 million for the wellness and recovery centre in Yellowknife;
• $8 million for planning and construction of schools, including $2 million to complete the work on the Mangilaluk School in Tuktoyaktuk and $3.5 million to renovate and expand the Aurora College Western Arctic Research Centre warehouse; and,
• $29 million in continued funding to support community governments with their infrastructure needs.

The overall capital spend is offset by a total of $183.3 million in support from the federal government through various infrastructure programs, including:

• $101.1 million from the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Plan;
• $23.3 million from the National Trade Corridors Fund;
• $20 million from the Department of National Defence;
• $17.8 million from the Building Canada Plan;
• $10.7 million from the Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund; and
• $10.2 million from other partnerships.

That concludes my opening remarks, Madam Chair. I would be happy to answer any questions Members may have. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister. We have agreed to begin with the general comments on the capital estimates. Do Members wish to make general comments before we consider the tabled document in detail? Member for Yellowknife North.

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.

Thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. Member for Frame Lake.

Merci, Madame la Presidente. I do have some comments to make on the capital estimates, but I have one question for the Minister to start with.

Earlier in this sitting, there was some information tabled in the House about a special warrant, and that also included some information about what GNWT expects to be, perhaps most of, what's required for flood relief, and the total was, I think, $174 million. So I know that this was unanticipated. We may be able to recover some of those costs, probably not all of them.

I'd like to know from the Minister what impact the Hay River flood relief and then the bigger issue of mitigation in the future, what impact that actually has on the operating surplus and the spending that's anticipated in the capital estimates. Thanks, Madam Chair.

Thank you. Minister of Finance. The witnesses are in, or are you okay with answering this?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, let me try and answer it, and I am sure the Member will let me know if we need to bring the witnesses in. There are finance witnesses in the witness room.

Madam Chair, yes, it's 174 -- I don't have that number in front of me, but it does sound approximately correct from my recollection. But I think the question is really getting at what that does to our fiscal situation. And, yes, having an over hundred -- unexpectedly over $100 million in costs associated with the floods takes out the surplus that we had been projecting for 2022-2023 and puts us into a situation where we are likely to be in a -- well, where we are expecting now to be in a deficit situation. So that does mean that we wouldn't be in compliance ultimately, if that's the case, with the Fiscal Responsibility Policy. However, you'll recall that there is a couple -- really, a period of two years of lag time to catch back up. So we may not -- it may actually not necessarily -- it means we don't have the surplus, but we may not be in noncompliance.

As for the longer-term projection, we are still expecting, because we do get a significant amount of that refunded by the federal government under the Disaster Assistance Policy, that does catch us back up. And so by 2023-2024, we would be back to anticipating a surplus in the amount of $131 million. Again, given that we would be, you know, I'm expecting that we won't get the money for disaster assistance this fiscal, or certainly not the bulk of it, and so then we wind up catching back up.

There's also a significant amount of catchup happening under the territorial formula finance policy because of all the costs that provinces were paying out during COVID. That reflects in terms of what we then get under the TIF. So, yes, this year definitely is being impacted but we do catch up. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you. Member for Frame Lake.

Thanks, Madam Chair. Can the Minister commit to provide some publicly-available information around these new projections that she has been talking about with regard to our finances and our fiscal situation resulting from the Hay River flooding? Thanks, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Member. Minister of Finance.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, Madam Chair, I'm happy to do that. We did do budget dialogues again this spring at which point we had an update for it at the spring period. But certainly a lot of the work to assist communities that were affected by the flood was taking place over the spring and summer. So those final numbers were coming in, and I am happy to get that information out again.

Thank you. Member for Frame Lake.

Thanks, Madam Chair. Does the Minister have a timeframe in mind for getting that information to us as Regular MLAs but also to the public? Thanks, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Member. Minister of Finance.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, so, you know, there were updates that were provided back in, I believe August, when we were preparing for this session. As I said, numbers related to the information that was received through the spring and summer as flood remediation work was ongoing certainly were being updated through the course of time. All of the information does go into the main estimates documents. I can see if we can put some sort of package together, you know, more urgently than that, you know, without having anyone from the department here in front of me -- and even if they were here I don't know that I could say if it's tomorrow or the next day. But I realize that Members may want to have that information this session so we'll get something together.

Thank you, Minister. Member for Frame Lake.

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.

Thank you, Member. Are there any further questions, comments? Member for Hay River South.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I guess this cautious approach, I guess, in spending in capital spending is interesting. But I guess what is concerning, I guess, to me, is that, you know, is that, you know, departments appear, I guess -- we know that they're unable to spend money -- spend the funding received from federal government to actually complete projects and, you know, we're seeing important projects being pushed back. We're seeing possible, you know, maybe lapse of funding; I'm not sure. But does the Minister -- does this raise a concern, I guess, to the Minister because, you know, we look at less spending on capital, but have we looked at anything else to maybe encourage, say, securing contractors to come north, finding ways to, you know, entice workers to come north so that we can actually, you know, take these projects on and, you know, finish them with the money we have before we start losing it. Thank you.

Thank you, Member. Minister.

Thank you, Madam Chair. So, Madam Chair, this isn't just, to be clear, a function of the circumstances of the labour market shortages that all of Canada and the world are experiencing today. This is reflective of, you know, the last ten years that we saw that, you know, the average spend in the last ten years year over year is around $250 million per year. So it's not new that we simply don't have the capacity in the North alone to be getting out to have much more than that spent in any particular given year. So it's not entirely a function of current labour market shortages. It is a function in part of general labour shortages in the North. You know, and to that I would say that over the course of that time, certainly before my time here or, you know, at the time of the 19th Assembly there have been efforts at increasing the population through, you know, various forms of recruitment. And they've also obviously not been successful. So, you know, I don't know that that alone is going to entirely solve the problem. I think there should be a broader look at increasing the population, increasing the economy, having a positive and pleasant and wonderful place to come and live and work as we all know it to be. Does that change the fact that for the last ten years or more the capital budget has been oversized relative to what we could perform? No, it doesn't. So fixing this problem doesn't mean we don't want to look at increasing the population. But I just want to kind of separate out that that isn't necessarily going to take away the reasons that we've done now what we've done now, which is to right size the capital plan, reduce the need to borrow, and to put money into planning. Thank you, Madam Chair.