Bill Braden

 Good morning.  Thank you, Mr. Speaker.  I listened with a great deal of interest, and I think a number of people across the Northwest Territories did this morning, to the CBC Radio interview with Randy Henderson and Anna Maria Tremonte and the former Justice Thomas Berger when they visited the question:  Is the NWT ready now for the Mackenzie Valley pipeline?  Is now the right time for the Mackenzie pipeline?

The survey, over the course of 40 minutes of phone-in air time, was obviously not scientific or all-encompassing, but it gave a very fascinating snapshot of where the mood may be today. ...

Mr. Speaker, the social agencies, the frontline agencies, continue to make the point to me as recently as yesterday with the budget that we are terribly under-prepared at the community level to cope with the consequences of a pipeline. This is where, I believe, we can really do something to help promote and engender the trust and preparedness at the community level. Will this government be prepared to come to their aid and do something soon?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my questions are for the Premier, continuing along the theme of resource development and the Mackenzie Valley pipeline. Mr. Speaker, I was really pleased to hear the Premier say that there is a realization that no, we are not ready for this project and that we have come, or at least he and his Cabinet have come close to defining some of the terms we need to see in place. That was at least specific to the pipeline that a resource revenue sharing deal must be in place before we will endorse the start of this pipeline. That is an admirable position to be in....

Mr. Speaker, we have had troubles over the last four or five years here anticipating that we were going to have revenue shortfalls given the growth in our economy and the needs of our social side, we continue to have some pretty aggressive budgets. Every year we were facing a debt wall and doom and gloom. Every year along came some kind of last-minute rescue package for us; thank goodness. But it is not a very good way to govern a place. It is not a great way to run a railroad. What I would like to know is, given the continued uncertainty, we really don’t know where our formula financing...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister of Finance, Mr. Roland, and they continue from the information we heard this afternoon on our budget. Mr. Speaker, the area that I would like to explore a little bit relates to our formula financing arrangement with the federal government. We are a billion dollar government. According to the document released this afternoon, almost three-quarters of that, or about $725 million, will come from Ottawa through the formula financing deal, Mr. Speaker.

Now, this has caused us problems in the past and, through the Department of Finance in...

A short supplementary, Mr. Speaker. Would the Minister be able to release any of the information about the mandate, criteria or baselines that we believe are important to the outcome of this? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, when the Minister says that we will definitely be plugging in, does that mean that we have a direct voice on this panel? Some other aspect of this was, are we sharing this with our sister territories, Yukon and Nunavut? Is everybody into the same hopper here, and experiencing the same procedure here? That is where I am going, Mr. Speaker. I am not quite certain just how involved and how close we are going to be to the process and the outcome. Thank you.

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. My congratulations, too, to the Tlicho people for their hard earned victory.

---Applause

Today is also budget day here, of course, Mr. Speaker, and in a quick summary here -- keeping score, if you will -- as Minister Roland was reading us the news, I have more points on the good news side of my ballot than on the bad news side, Mr. Speaker.

Just to give a quick response to a couple of the highlights that I’ve heard, we will take the bad news side, Mr. Speaker. I will keep coming back to the housing agenda. The budget contains some five paragraphs of discussion about...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is useful information. I guess I would like to return to my original theme though, which is how are we making land available that is affordable to build on? We are discussing here a bit of the process of making land available at least around Yellowknife, but I would like to look at what steps we are doing on a territorial basis, Mr. Speaker, to make land for housing more affordable and available in our communities. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question this afternoon is directed to the Honourable Michael McLeod in his capacity as Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs. It relates to the whole issue of being able to provide affordable housing, Mr. Speaker. One of the biggest barriers, the first barrier that communities and developers experience is the lack of access to affordable land for building and development. I wanted to see if the Minister could advise the Assembly what ways he has looked at to make land more affordable and available to community governments. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.