Thanks, Madam Chair, for stopping the time on me. Okay, well, I'll offer a few comments, then.
So I guess I want to start with page 2, the introduction and, you know, I continue to point out that the biggest part of our capital budget is highways and roads at 26 percent. Housing is 4 percent. When our government continues to spend, you know, six times as much on highways and roads as we spend on housing -- and I understand that this is probably not -- doesn't include some federal money and so on, but this is money that we're spending, and when our government continues to spend six times as much on roads versus housing, there's something wrong, fundamentally wrong with the way that we do our budgeting and we allocate our resources, period. Look, roads are important. I get it. I had to drive out of here during the evacuation. But that's it, right there. Anybody wants to know what the priorities of this government are, look at page 2. We're spending way, way more than roads and highways than on housing. It says it all to me.
So when I get the Minister in front of us, we will find out that there's very significant carryovers from the previous years, although there's this $260 million cap on capital spending. It's actually a lot more than that. A lot of this is carryovers. We just cannot -- continually cannot get the money out the door. Doesn't matter what we do. We just cannot spend the money. And that leads to very significant overbudgeting again and again and again. I don't think I've actually voted in favour of a capital budget in the eight years I've been an MLA because of the significant overbudgeting on the capital side because then you have to build up a surplus to be able to spend money on capital, which you don't actually end up spending at the end of the day, which means you have to cut and scrimp and save money on the O and M side, programs and services that our people need. That's what it comes down to. That's what the overbudgeting on the capital ends up doing. It means we're not spending money on people on their basic human needs. And that's why I'll continue to oppose the capital budgets that this Cabinet brings forward.
The other thing that I'm particularly concerned about and I'll ask the Minister when we get her in front of us is the new fiscal situation. I listened to her very carefully. She delivered a fiscal update today in terms of, you know, the unexpected expenditures from fires and so on. I don't think there's been anything changed in this capital budget as a result of that. That's not a good place to be. We're going to run a deficit. The Premier said it. It's in the news. We're going to run a deficit because of these unexpected expenditures. But I don't sense that anything's changed. It's business as usual. That's just not good financial management. And we're leaving the next Assembly in a very difficult position because of this continued overbudgeting on the capital side.
I could say a bunch of things about some of these individual projects, and I'll probably save some of that for when we get to the line items, Madam Chair. But there's no way I can support this budget when we continue to spend way more on roads than we do on housing. Wrong priorities. And I just disagree with Cabinet fundamentally on this since day one. Thank you very much.