Bob Bromley

What I’m hearing is once you get up into the very high income bracket, you get a protection of about $1,000 and you may be paying several thousand dollars. For the rest, everybody can be protected under that very high income bracket and there would be no effect assuming we adjusted the cost of living tax credit, which would also likely benefit those people again in the high income bracket. Again, I don’t see this holding much water except to protect those in the very high income brackets that obviously don’t need the same degree of protection that we could and very obviously are serving, as we...

As I mentioned before, this is starting to create a pattern. I’m all in favour of dilution…

---Laughter

…devolution, we all are. We want devolution for the people of the NWT, not just to the GNWT Executive. How does the Premier propose to reverse these power grabs and put oil and gas decision-making back in the realm of independent and fair public boards? If he’d like to add how we’re going to do all this public consultation instead of just saying that and creating structures that don’t have any public consultation, I’d be happy to hear that too. Mahsi.

That’s fine. Thanks very much. Perhaps the Minister’s discussion paper on that developed in consultation with the Regular Members could be part of that. That’s all I had. Thank you.

I hope the Minister isn’t trying to be obtuse here. Obviously, the net gain would be significant and that’s what we’re aiming for is increased revenues. So what would be the actual total or what would be the income you would have to have before you would lose access to the cost of living tax credit?

I would like to publicly commit to elevating my thinking. Boards are different from departments. Boards make decisions based on evidence that is presented to them. Departments make decisions based on politics. How can we be sure that decisions made by the new regulator will be based on evidence and not based on politics when they are made behind closed doors of the Executive? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I’d appreciate that. Would the Minister have the information handy why we’re considering another compliance control officer for this tax collection? Thank you.

I hope I would have your support to get an answer here. I know what the decision was, obviously. It’s represented in the budget here. I’m asking why. What was the thinking? What was the assessment of increases in the payroll tax? What were the barriers? Why didn’t we go there?

This is not the first year that this has been raised. This has been raised repeatedly during my short career as a politician, so I’m looking to find out why we are not taking advantage of this apparent real opportunity to increase our revenue when we so very clearly need revenue, as the Minister has said. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thanks to the Minister. The experience has no correlation with doing it right; of course, we know that.

The National Energy Board recently announced that it would require worst case financial security deposits on all oil and gas exploration. Some junior exploration companies were complaining that they could not afford to explore on the same scale as big companies if they had to pay clean-up costs in advance and I heard the Minister complain about this progressive attempt towards responsible management, presumably from lobbying by these companies. Is this shift away from...

The Minister has said that there may be compliance issues at play in the collection of the payroll tax and that he was considering having the program review office take a look at it with that in mind. Thank you.

How would that vary? Just on that, has the department… We obviously need revenue. This government needs revenue; I don’t think anybody questions that. Payroll tax, based on information provided by the Minister, is providing significant funds, some of which we lose through this cost of living tax credit, but it still leaves significant dollars. I believe it was increased from 1 percent originally to 2 percent. Given our situation where we have so many migrant workers who live somewhere else and work here and take their dollars away so that there are very few benefits, this is the only...