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.