Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I know we are in the midst of an operating budget but the work never stops, and I'd like to make some comments today about the transparency in our capital budget. And I believe in making these comments and asking questions today, hopefully I can give the departments enough time to improve the transparency of our capital budget.
Firstly, Mr. Speaker, many jurisdictions publish a multiyear capital plan and in doing so, they give a range of the cost of each project. In the Northwest Territories, we don't do that. I'll note we pass some money to build a school in Colville Lake this Assembly, and I can't tell you how much that is projected to cost. I can't have a public debate about whether I think that is too little or too much money, Mr. Speaker. We also passed some money to build a hydro line to Whati, and the department refuses to publicly state how much they expect that to cost.
And the argument given here, Mr. Speaker, is that it'll affect the tendering process. And this really is just not a valid argument considering you can provide ranges, considering most of our projects go out to tender in multiple stages at multiple times. And especially with hydro lines, Mr. Speaker, I am not at all convinced that we can't publicly state how much it costs to build power infrastructure and have an honest conversation about whether there is a business case, whether the Power Corp will be recouping that, whether we're trying to get money from the federal government. But we can't even state how much that costs. The other side will not provide that number publicly.
And, Mr. Speaker, and it's not just the projected costs. It's the actual costs. Often the GNWT will say well, this is all kind of wrapped up in the public accounts but the public accounts is not concerned with individual project costs. I would really like us to do more work to publish our actuals. I have a dream of, you know, each project after it's completed, it has listed the total cost, the contractor, any change orders, whether it was delayed, whether there were carryovers, the reason for carryovers.
Now that may be a bit too much to ask for the GNWT, but right now it is impossible, and we have asked our staff multiple times, to tell you what a project costs year over year. You can't track it through the capital estimates. There is far too much carryover; there is far too much accounting language going on to actually know what something costs. So I'm going to have questions for the Minister of Finance if we can get some work to do better transparency on our capital planning. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.