Mr. Speaker, I wish to present to the House Bill 10, Appropriation Act (Operations Expenditures), 2024-2025, to be read for the first time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Minister of Finance. Pursuant to rule 8.2(3), Bill 10 is deemed to have first reading as ready for second reading.

First reading of bills. Second reading of bills. Minister of Finance.

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Nunakput, that Bill 9, Supplementary Appropriation Act (Infrastructure Expenditures), No. 1, 2024-2025, be read for the second time.

This bill makes supplementary appropriations for infrastructure expenditures of the Government of the Northwest Territories for the 2024-2025 fiscal year. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Minister. The motion is in order. To the principle of the bill.

Question has been called. All those in favour? Opposed? Abstentions? The motion is carried. Bill 9 has been read for a second time.

---Carried

Second reading of bills. Minister of Finance.

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Nunakput, that Bill 10, Appropriation Act (Operations Expenditures), 2024-2025, be read for the second time.

This bill authorizes the Government of the Northwest Territories to make appropriations for operations expenditures for the 2024-2025 fiscal year. It also sets out limits on amounts that may be borrowed by the Commissioner on behalf of the government, includes information in respect of all existing borrowing and all projected borrowing for the fiscal year, and authorizes the making of disbursements to pay the principal of the amounts borrowed. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Minister. The motion is in order. To the principal of the bill.

Question has been called. All those in favour? Opposed? Abstentions? The motion is carried. Bill 10 has second reading.

---Carried

Second reading of bills. Consideration in Committee of the Whole of bills and other matters. Reports of the Committee of the Whole. Third reading of bills. Minister of Finance.

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Nunakput, that Bill 9, Supplementary Appropriation Act (Infrastructure Expenditures), No. 1, 2024-2025, be read for a third time. And, Mr. Speaker, I would request a recorded vote. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Minister. The motion is in order. To the bill.

Question has been called. All those in favour? The Member is asking for a recorded vote. Please stand.

Sorry, folks. All those in favour, 16. Zero opposed. Zero abstentions. Motion has passed.

---Carried

Third reading of bills. Minister of Finance.

Thank you, Minister. The motion is in order. To the motion. Member from Inuvik Boot Lake.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, to say it's been a bit of a grind these last couple of weeks I think is a bit of an understatement. Certainly, I know we've -- for those of us who it's our first time going through the budget process, certainly a learning experience and, yeah, and a long experience. Again, a big thanks to the staff that beared with us through this process.

I was going to say something cheeky about the Minister of Finance, but she works way too hard for me to do that. And I'm not going to lie, I'm a little bit scared of her as well so -- after the past three weeks.

Mr. Speaker, I'm going to be supporting this budget today and, listen, it's a balance. I know, you know, it's a balance when we come as Members from our constituents, we all have things we'd like to see in the budget, things that maybe we aren't so interested in the budget and, you know, we have to get through as a group. We understand that there's -- you know, we have some fiscal restraint that we need to look at for this government based on what's happened in previous governments, and I think we're heading in that right direction and I guess I commend everybody on that.

Having said that, of course, I'll continue as I have in this House, and I'm sure other Members will as well, to advocate for things that are in the budget, certainly partially, some things are in the budget wholeheartedly, but things that we'll continue to work towards. And, Mr. Speaker, I'll speak to a couple of those.

Certainly on our housing, housing is one of our major -- you know, one of our main priorities in this House. I know how passionate and certainly how hard working the Minister of housing is, and I know I'm going to see that transferred to her department as well. But what I will say is please spend the money, spend the money. We have units that need to be built. We have units that need to be repaired. We have people sitting and waiting for these units that have been promised these units, Mr. Speaker, and they're still waiting to get in them. So let's ensure to do whatever we have to do to get that money spent.

On addictions, Mr. Speaker, you've heard a lot of us speak on addictions here and what it's doing to our territory, what's happening in our communities with the drug trade, with the hard drugs that are in our communities. And, Mr. Speaker, I think that's going to take not only an investment in programs or an investment in infrastructure there when the time comes, we need places for people to go so when they come back into this territory after getting the significant treatment they need that they have a place to continue that treatment and not fall back into those situations that got them there in the first place, Mr. Speaker. So, again, and I know it's not only important to me, it's important to everybody on both sides of this House.

I'm happy, Mr. Speaker, with education and early learning and child care. I know, again, the Minister's very passionate on that issue, and I'm happy to see that we do have some additional funding in there to ensure that we're paying the people that look after the people that allow us to go to work every day and to make sure that we're able to attract professional people to work in our early learning centres and to give them the compensation that they deserve, they require, and to continue to do what they do. So that certainly makes me very happy. And I know speaking from members in my riding and the Children's First Society in my riding, it will be very welcomed news.

Economic growth, Mr. Speaker, you've heard me say in this House before, and I'll continue to speak about it, about, you know, thinking outside the box, I'm going to continue to advocate for our natural resources, I'm going to continue to advocate for natural gas in my region, and I'll continue to advocate for working with our Indigenous governments who are, again, leading the way on a lot of these -- certainly in my riding, leading the way on this initiative there. And I trust that we will continue to work with them and ensure that we are taking advantage of that as well.

It was spoken about passionately here today, with the Member certainly from the Sahtu -- he knows my opinion on this issue -- the Mackenzie Valley Highway is a must, Mr. Speaker. In my riding or in the Beaufort Delta, our trade route is through the Yukon. There's no doubt millions of dollars pour in through Yukon to Edmonton to Whitehorse. That is our trade route, Mr. Speaker, because that is our route to get there, and we need that highway. And I hear it regularly throughout my riding, our constituents, get that highway built. So I'm glad to hear the inspiring words that our Minister said today, as well as my colleagues, that, you know, we are going to get there, and we'll continue to push for that.

There's many other issues, Mr. Speaker, I could speak to. I got to tell you I'm a little low on gas, pardon the pun, after these last couple of weeks but I would like to say a huge thank you, obviously, to my colleagues, to our deputy chair of AOC, our Member from Deh Cho, and the work that AOC has done on this, to our amazing staff that have guided us through this work and stuck with us through thick and thin and, of course, to our Cabinet colleagues and specifically the Minister of Finance who's been nothing but professional and forthcoming and the Premier for stepping in when he had to and kicking some things across the goal line, which I certainly appreciated. And also the Minister of health, I know we had a little back and forth. But all of Cabinet, seriously, it's been a process. It's never easy. But I think we finally got there, something that I think we can be proud of. And I'll have some suggestions for the Minister of Finance on how we can maybe do this process a little differently next year, but we can talk about that at a later date. But, again, thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Member from Inuvik Boot Lake. To the motion. Member from Range Lake.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I want to start by thanking the honourable Members of this House and those in the public service and the Legislative Assembly who work to support us. This has been a demanding sitting. And without the attention of its Members and the diligence of our staff, we could not have accomplished our task of concluding the 2024 Budget. And I do want to give them a shout out as many members have today.

Mr. Speaker, compared to the last Speaker, my friend from Boot Lake, this will be a glass half empty speech to his glass half full, but I think it's important to contrast different expectations we may have in this House and also speak to our process of how we budget. I do want to thank the Minister of Finance for agreeing to partially fund the financial requests of the Standing Committee on Accountability and Oversight to the tune of $13,349,000. This includes reinstatements of the $2.58 million towards the community access program and the small community employment support funding; $3.5 million for early learning and child care funding; $500,000 for the Aurora College transformation project; and a commitment towards revenue neutral carbon pricing.

I want to, well, thank her in her speech yesterday for acknowledging that the standing committee, nor its membership, must align itself with the government's fiscal strategy; however, referencing this strategy in the same vein as committee's requests seems to imply that we are opposed to that strategy or more broadly we are promoting undisciplined spending during fiscal restraint. This is not the case. Many members on this side of the House have spoken for the need for restraint, including the last Speaker, especially around the growth of government jobs and unsustainable public sector growth. What Members have called for, rather, is an investment in priorities and a cohesive plan to develop spending to the areas as it's most needed, not to spending more money -- then not to spending more money when we don't have it. To be clear, the standing committee did not prescribe where the Minister needs to find the money, only that she spends it and perhaps alter other expenditures as a result. This government does not have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem. Revenue continues to grow year after year. That is not the Northwest Territories' problem. Our problem is how we spend those dollars.

Mr. Speaker, $13,349,000 in a $2.2 billion budget is not a modest sum of money. It is, at best, a rounding error worth less than a percentage point. For the countless hours that the standing committee and the House poured into Budget 2024, it's incredible to me that there's so much handwringing and negotiation that was required to get it. It's almost as if our system functions to corral our Members into fighting for table scraps as the machinery of government chugs along, undaunted by the supposed minority position of Cabinet. We have all been ground down by this process, long days and nights eroding any sense of priority other than get us out of here. We should be fighting for our constituents, not against our own exhaustion. After 23 hours and 26 minutes, we can do far better than this outcome and far, far better than this process.

Mr. Speaker, $13 million and change has not saved the midwifery program. It has not rolled back the changes to extended health benefits that will drive up costs for many of my constituents. And it has resulted in a little more than a stay of execution for the Fort Smith correctional centre. We heard loud and clear that these things are important to everyday Northerners, working hard to stay ahead of a world that is getting more expensive, less predictable, and far more dangerous. Likewise, we missed an opportunity to phase out private agency nursing by 2027, to stop the slow moving privatization of our health care system, a move that would have cost nothing and done so much to improve staff morale and send a clear message that we value our health care professionals and will do anything to make our system work better for them instead of rely on an expensive band-aid solution.

Mr. Speaker, there is much I continue to support in this budget. Expanded and enhanced policing, economic initiatives around film, fisheries, and mining, health care investments, and more planning towards transformative infrastructure projects like Taltson Hydro, the Slave Geological Province Road, and Mackenzie Valley Highway. These initiatives are more -- these initiatives and more are contained in this budget and are critical to the future of the Northwest Territories and to Range Lake as they align with the promises I made to my voters; promises I intend to keep.

So I will be voting to support this budget, but I will also continue to hold accountable the government for the commitments they've made to address the concerns we brought forward both at committee and in this House, particularly the promises made to midwives, health care professionals, correctional officers, and to the community of Fort Smith. I look forward to moving forward and this government to start making progress towards achieving its mandate and realizing the promises of all of our political priorities. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Member from Range Lake. To the motion. Member from Great Slave.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I do not have a fancy speech; I have bullet points so bear with me. I think overall, generally speaking, it's a sign of a good negotiation when both sides come away somewhat unsatisfied. I also want to thank the AOC chair and AOC deputy chair. These two folks have done a fantastic job for the folks that are here on this side of the House. Much gratitude to you both.

The conversations that I will continue to have with this Cabinet focus on four main areas. The first, after listening to my colleague from Yellowknife North, is the Office of the Children's Lawyer. When we have folks in legal aid pleading with us not to cut that office, I think we should listen to them. The second is midwifery. The conversations that folks on this side of the House, and I think most of the Members on this side of the House and some on Cabinet have had with the folks in midwifery in the NWT, have pointed to the lack of a system that truly supports making midwifery a strong reality in our territory. I think the benefit and path forward from these conversations that I see as a positive, and up to those conversations that I was having as late as today, Mr. Speaker, was that there is a door open for those conversations to continue, and I think the relationship is one that can continue to build, and I look forward to working helping to build that wherever I can. When it comes to extended health benefits, I want to thank Cabinet for increasing the threshold as I campaigned on the absolute dire straits that many people in my riding find themselves in with the cost of living. Any time we're asking people who are ill or disabled to have even more hardship is something we need to take a closer look at. I am confident the Minister of health is going to look at that very carefully in the rollout of this program.

And, finally, when it comes to the fact that we are in fiscal restraint, Mr. Speaker, and that very much means that the writing might be on the wall for the -- how do I put this -- one of the options available in the tool kit of this government is reductions in the public service, Mr. Speaker. And while I recognize that might be an attractive tool to save money, I would really encourage specifically the Minister of Finance, who is responsible for the public service, to heed the mandate letter that she just received today from the Premier. And that reads: The GNWT has an amazing workforce, one which continuously strives to provide services and programs to the best of their ability to residents. As Ministers, we must provide public servants with the guidance and tools necessary for them to work with us in our commitment to serving the people of the NWT.

So some of those tools should be how -- if their jobs are no longer necessary, how they can be trained up for other jobs in the public service, Mr. Speaker, and how we can support them to transition and give them lots of time to contemplate how that might look. So I will continue to press on that, Mr. Speaker.

One of my colleagues here in the House used the word in this session that I really, really like, and that word is heartful. Being heartful and vulnerable are assets in a consensus government, not liabilities. It's been very apparent to me that the more that you spend time speaking from your heart in this building, the more people will hear you and the more concessions on both sides can happen. Listening in a heart forward way I think is the way that the majority of us do our work here every day since November, and I hope that that can continue and that we can continue to have hard discussions and good conversations and make good choices for the residents of the NWT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

To the motion. Member from the Sahtu.