Daryl Dolynny

I guess the question is: Does the government see the potential benefits of increasing the amount of wage dollars going to those most vulnerable on the low end of the wage scale? Does the government or the department not see a benefit of not only raising the average wage, which we did, but also take a look at a combination of also putting more dollars in people’s back pockets by adjusting the cost of living tax credit?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to thank the Minister for replying to the majority of my opening comments. On page 148, it does list in the taxation column both for tobacco and fuel tax, we see a very modest and actually very insignificant I call it decrease in the revised estimates to the main estimates. In fact, it’s almost statistically insignificant when you factor in an audit component.

That being said, if we look at the statistics we are getting from the Department of Health which clearly indicates that the smoking rate is going down, the number of smokers is going down, so just by virtue of...

So, how will Members know the findings of this audit? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Minister Miltenberger.

Madam Chair, I have no further questions.

I appreciate that response. So, for the sake of fullness here, four out of the 11 outside wholesalers, these are wholesalers that are established outside the border of Northwest Territories. Is this the first time that this government has audited these outside wholesalers? Thank you.

Thank you, committee. Sergeant-at-Arms, if you can please escort our witnesses into the House.

Minister Miltenberger, if you would be kind enough to introduce your witnesses to the House, please.

The government has used, in the past, tools such as the Fairness Commissioner to help mitigate very significant RFPs and most recently the issue with the medevac program. What safeguards do we have for these businesses that we’ll have a degree of fairness? Again, they’re working with big brother, they’re dealing with big brother and they’re at the mercy of big brother. What tools do they have to make sure that big brother is playing nice in the sandbox?

I guess the rationale for my questioning is that sometimes in business the quickest fix to find money is to go lean on insurance and do a re-evaluation of your replacement costs and depreciate those costs to the tune where it makes it very difficult to make that investment. I’m just hoping that we as a government are maintaining the right level of insurance for the amount of assets we have coming on our books. That’s my rationale for the question, Mr. Chair.

We know that this area of the activity is involved with debt management. With that, we know that the Macroeconomic Policy, which is used...

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Do you have witnesses you want to bring into the House today?