Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Excuse me, we're going to have to start replacing our water with red bull if we keep having these long days.

Mr. Speaker, as one of my colleagues have said, my colleague from Range Lake, we spent over 20 hours on -- 22, sorry, yes. So I'm going to touch on some of the negotiated items in my response today. I won't go through them all; I'm going to leave that to the Minister as she's going to obviously articulate those when she speaks to the bill. But I want to talk a little more about the process, Mr. Speaker, and how we got here and why are we here, I guess, Mr. Speaker.

We're all elected officials and we'll hear the saying all the time, if you're an elected official you have to have thick skin, and maybe so.
But, Mr. Speaker, we're also people. We're passionate residents from our communities, from our ridings, that get up every day and go to work, just like everyone else. It just so happens that our work, Mr. Speaker, is in politics. And to do that work, Mr. Speaker, you often carry a heavy load. You know, you're carrying the expectations and the issues from our constituents in our respective ridings, and we carry those on our shoulders when we come in here, and we take that serious. And it's often a heavy load, Mr. Speaker. And if you're from a smaller community, it often can be heavier. And I'm not -- that's not saying that the larger regions or the capital, Mr. Speaker, don't have important issues that they're carrying as well but, I mean, in the smaller communities you have issues where you have constituents who are regularly having to do medical travel. You have constituents that don't have access to government services like you do in the larger centres. You know, there's limited opportunities for employment in some of the smaller communities. And those things can be a heavy burden. And, you know, the Members from those ridings have to, you know, come into this House carrying that.

And, Mr. Speaker, you know as well while we're vast in size geographically, we are small in numbers and our ridings are typically small. And every Member here will know if you go to the grocery store to pick up a carton of milk on what typically would be a five or ten-minute task, Mr. Speaker, likely will take an hour, maybe two, when you have to go and do that because you're regularly -- I mean, you're -- typically, your constituent's your neighbour or your workers are your neighbours and they can reach out to come and see you on a regular basis, and that -- and that, you know, makes our job not that much more difficult but certainly we're always engaged with constituents which, again, is very important.

So, Mr. Speaker, we ought to be and, indeed, I feel some -- it's our job, and often we do, is that we help carry that load for -- you know, for our Members, for our colleagues, and we do that. It's something that I think we can improve on but certainly we do that. And when I look at -- in this budget, I look at the $41 million, $50 million, and $50 million, so the overall $150 million that are being -- that's being allocated for housing. I think that's a good example where we're all willing to carry that load for each other. It's something you've heard in this House. We said it through Members' statements. Obviously, we've brought it up in the last budget when we talked about the notional plan. This has been a priority and likely the number priority of this House. It's something that we had focused on. And, you know, and I think to get to this point, it's not a small ask. I mean, it's a lot of money. It's not -- you know, it's likely we're going to have to take out some debt to do that, but that's good debt. That's capital infrastructure debt, and I think it's important that -- you know, that we note that. You know, this means that there's more affordable housing across the Northwest Territories. This means if you're a tradesperson, if you're -- you know, if you're looking for work, that's going to increase that work. There's an economic benefit to this, Mr. Speaker. And, you know, and that also means that homes that have sat vacant -- I've spoken to people who work for housing corp in my riding, and certainly in other ridings, you know, where you get -- sorry. Are you -- sorry, where you get -- sorry, I'll look over here.

We have vacant units there, Mr. Speaker, that are -- that have been vacant for years and not because they're not habitable but because we haven't had the M and I funding, the funding that we need the maintenance to get that work done. And when -- you know, when I have -- I have people reaching out to me from my region after reading the article saying there's going to be $50 million put into housing, they're ecstatic. They're saying, jeez, I -- you know, give me a couple of million and I can get several people put into their homes. And -- you know, and that's, you know, important work, and it's an important effect. And it also affects not only people in trades or to provide employment through contractors and otherwise. You're looking at from sandwich shops to hardware stores to this kind of spending does have an economic impact in the region. So it's very, very important.

Mr. Speaker, consensus did get us here. I know we've had a lot of conversation around consensus. And I know, even those who feel the budget didn't go far enough, Mr. Speaker, and I know there are Members here that feel like, you know, this budget is not far enough, we could have done more, and I understand that and I respect that. But, Mr. Speaker, make no mistake, everyone at AOC makes significant contributions to the final budget we have in front of us today. Everyone had an opportunity to speak and, again, what we didn't get, you know, in our ridings, you're never going to get everything you want in your riding, or our budget would triple, I'm sure, to do that. But it was through consensus that we got here. I mean, obviously, there were some very heated discussions and debate along the way. But, Mr. Speaker, we are AOC, and as much as it behooves us to follow our mandate to withhold Cabinet accountable, it also behooves us to support the work that Cabinet does. We chose them. They're our Cabinet. We elected them. We put them in there to be our leadership group. And we have to put some faith in what they do while holding them accountable, of course, is our mandate, but we do have to work -- and that's consensus, we have to work with them.

As I said, Mr. Speaker, no one in this House got everything they wanted for their riding. You know, for me, I mean, I'm going to continue to advocate for LNG. You've heard me say this in the House many, many times, we need a source of revenue. We have a source of revenue set in the ground up there, 19 trillion cubic feet of it. And we need -- we have a report that says it's feasible to do that, and we have to continue, and where I will continue to push for that and to push for our natural resources to get exported, to get that gas out of the ground to provide some royalties in here.

I'm going to continue to push for our childcare centres. I brought that up in the House. And, you know, we've got the $3.5 million last year and, yes, it's slow to roll out. There is more work to be done here, and I'm going to take the Ministers and the Cabinet and her commitment to look to find a way to include day homes and to find a way that we can make sure that we have a sustainable daycare and childcare in our communities.

The community learning centres, we've had a lot of conversation around that. And again, I agree, we either are ones that are working, ones that need work. And I know that the Minister understands that is our mandate to provide, you know -- learning, adult basic education, adult learning, and I'm hopeful that when we're coming back in May, I'm excited to see in it the next sitting what that plan will be to ensure that there's continuity there and it's not just one and done and shut down, as the college has decided to do.

Arctic sovereignty, you've heard me in this House, and I'm still -- I'll still be advocating to the Premier to get our Arctic sovereignty council set up which the Yukon has done. They also have a security and university down there now. I forget the name of the course that they're offering down there, what they're doing, but, again, it's a council they're working on their security down there. And I'll continue to do that.

And I'll continue to advocate for working with Indigenous governments closer, whether it's through housing as we've talked about here, whether it was through pooling funds, or whether it's working together on projects, again, a key piece of what we do.

But having said that, Mr. Speaker, I'm satisfied that the supplemental appropriations to come and the commitments on policy review and renewal that the Minister of Finance will outline when she speaks to this bill -- and I won't get into every detail. I'll let the Minister do that. And I think those are significant. And for those reasons, Mr. Speaker, I will be voting in favour of the budget today.

I'd like to thank my colleagues, a special thank you to the Member from Deh Cho, our deputy chair, who's been negotiating this budget with me on behalf of AOC with the Minister, her wisdom, I certainly appreciate that, her ability to relate to what it's like to live in a small community and ensure that small communities do matter and that their voices are heard at that able.

I appreciate that. I appreciate Cabinet. I appreciate the conversations I've had with Minister Kuptana around housing. And I appreciate obviously the Minister Wawzonek, the Minister of Finance for her -- someone already said, for her pragmatism, for being pragmatic, for sitting down for her wisdom and to -- you know, to work to get to where we are. And it wasn't easy. And I'm sure there's Members on Cabinet, Mr. Speaker, that didn't get everything they wanted for their department or their riding either, and, you know -- and that's -- and conversations I've had with Cabinet will say the same thing, you know, if everybody got everything they wanted, we'd triple our budget.

And finally, again, thank you to my colleagues at AOC. I appreciate that not everyone is happy with everything we got. But I do want to thank them for their voice, for the -- for allowing myself and the Member from the Deh Cho to go and negotiate this budget. Again, this is -- this is huge. The $150 million we got I think is a huge win for this government. Not for this committee, but for this government and for the people of the Northwest Territories. We're going to see waitlists go down. We're going to see more people moving into homes, either new homes or renovated homes. That was key as the Member from Frame Lake has said. It was a big piece for us, and I'm super happy that we got there, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.