Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, as we all know, the committee of Regular Members brought forward a letter at the start of this session explaining our concerns about the health care crisis and the housing crisis, stating that we need to see significant steps to improve both before we can support the capital budget.

So on health care, we are still in a crisis, but I also understand that the path forward requires more operational changes than capital-related changes. There are steps being taken such as the establishment of the health care system sustainability unit which we certainly need to continue to monitor closely to ensure we actually gain some momentum in addressing these urgent problems.

Where I still do not see a path forward is with regard to the housing crisis. Currently, we seem to be stuck in an outdated way of thinking about what our vision is for public housing in the NWT. As I mentioned in my Member's statement earlier today, the philosophy certainly of the federal government for decades has been that the government just needs to get out of public housing, just kind of ease our way out, and then the market will solve all of our housing problems. But this completely ignores the realities in small nonmarket communities.

All the evidence we have of where our communities' economies are at and incomes in these small nonmarket communities, all this evidence leads us to the conclusion that a significant portion of our population will continue to depend on public housing to meet their basic shelter needs. And so our public housing stock needs to be larger than it currently is to allow our population to meet their basic shelter needs.

As we know, basic shelter is the most foundational aspect of any of the priorities we've set in this Assembly. Without basic shelter, people cannot pursue their education, they cannot stay healthy, they cannot keep a job, and we cannot grow our economy.

I feel like we've been wishing away the need for more public housing. Just hoping or waiting until something or someone else takes care of it, that maybe the Indigenous governments will build enough private housing in each community that those who currently reside in public housing will be able to move out, and that'll free up enough public housing for all the people who need it, even though there's 900 people who are on the waiting list who apparently need it. We just have no evidence to believe that that is actually possible or going to happen. And in fact, all of our evidence leads us to a different conclusion, which is we need more public housing stock. I mean, we've been failing to allocate enough money so far even to take care of all of our existing assets in terms of our public housing stock let alone allocating money to expand our public housing stock. And we continually look to the federal government for a hail Mary. If we look to our neighboring territory, if we look at the Nunavut 3000 strategy, we see that it is, indeed, possible for a territory to increase its public housing stock and to devote its own territorial money, resources, to actually doing that, to making it happen.

But why is this important for my riding, for YK North? First, I mean, somewhere between one-third to a half of the public housing waiting list is in Yellowknife, so it's not only demand in small nonmarket communities, but rising homelessness across the territory also has huge impacts on my riding, and all of Yellowknife, and I hear about that every day from constituents. Most of the people who have ended up homeless on the streets of Yellowknife are not originally from here. The latest survey from the review of Street Outreach found that 90 percent of the people who were using the Street Outreach services who are on the streets of Yellowknife are not from Yellowknife. They've ended up here. Why?

A lot of that reason is because of lack of adequate housing in their home communities. So perhaps more than any other issue housing, and specifically public housing, links all communities in this territory with the ripple effects of chronic underinvestment and it costs all communities, including Yellowknife.

So for these reasons, I feel I have no choice today but to vote against the capital budget. And I don't take that vote lightly. I understand that the ideal way to achieve these kinds of policy changes I'm talking about is not to vote against the capital budget, but the status quo way of doing things doesn't seem to be accomplishing those policy changes either.

I want to be clear that I have full confidence in the finance Minister. I have full confidence in the Premier and in Members of Cabinet. I still have a lot to learn about the best ways to create effective change as a Regular MLA. But I also think there needs to be a lot of adjustments to our status quo way of doing things, way of working in this building, for us to successfully achieve our priorities. I don't want to suggest that we just open the flood gates to endless spending, and I know many people fear that if we start spending more on public housing, it will be a black hole of spending that will never be enough.

I am by nature, I would say, a fiscal conservative. My instinct is always to help us reign in spending, to be more efficient, to find savings. I would like to have more of a role in that. I do think we need to shift where we spend. I would like to see more opportunities for Regular MLAs to be part of those tough conversations about tradeoffs, priorities, shifting spending, to be part of those conversations much earlier on to talk about the kinds of things we would like to shift spending away from so that we can responsibly increase our funding for housing, and specifically public housing. So I'll leave it there for now, Mr. Chair, but I wanted to explain the way I plan to vote on this budget. Thank you.