Michael Miltenberger

The over $300 million that we do spend provides a very high level of service to the people. The Member’s point is a good one. We’ll never have enough hospitals, enough facilities to put people back together, to get them healthy once they’re sick, and the challenge is an unmet challenge, is the one that the Member lays out.

Will this be used? We’re going into an election here in a couple weeks. There will be in the next few months an Assembly elected and a Cabinet picked. Through the business planning process and the priorities of the next Assembly, they will be targeting where they think the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following two documents entitled Interactivity Transfers Exceeding $250,000 for the Period April 1, 2010, to March 31, 2011, and Northwest Territories Liquor Commission and Liquor Licensing Board 2010-2011 Annual Report.

I’m sure the Member’s not calling me fat, so I won’t take offence to that comment.

I would suggest this Assembly and, of course, more importantly, the 17th Assembly is going to have to deal with a number of significant issues like this as we move forward with devolution and as we move forward with the deficit reduction impacts that we’re going to feel over the next three or four years coming out of the federal government. There’s going to be some difficult circumstances and money is going to be a priority issue both to us and as we negotiate arrangements with the federal government to honour...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I had opportunity to talk to Minister Kent when he was here a number of weeks ago. These cuts are going to be felt across the land. They’re going to be felt in the Northwest Territories.

Specifically, I sent information out, for example, on the closing of water monitoring sites where we have 23 and they’re closing 21; all 10 in Nunavut, two on the boundaries between Nunavut and Northwest Territories that are important. They’re going to discontinue monitoring through national parks. There’s no monitoring on the Mackenzie River. There’s a whole list of implications for us...

The intent is to take a careful measured look at this service and where it makes the most sense to be applied, where is there critical mass, where is there any service at all, transportation issues, the population issues, and if there was a need to put birthing services in a community, some of the questions, for example, would you want to put it into a community that already has some of the best birthing services in the Northwest Territories or would you look at a region where it possibly has a greater chance to provide some service where none exists currently. Those are the kind of questions...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Member has been in this Assembly 16 budgets, as have I, and we’ve talked since that time about taxes, resource royalty taxes, mining taxes, ways to raise revenue. We’ve tried hotel taxes and road tolls. We contemplated other taxes, as well, increases to the payroll tax. We’ve lived through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression in the 1930s where we had to be very careful in terms of further negatively impacting the business community at a time when they were suffering significant loss.

The challenge for the 17th Assembly is going to be we are going...

As I indicated to the Member for Nahendeh, I will raise this issue not only with the deputy minister but I’ll be talking to the board chairs about the concern and who, in turn, can talk to the senior staff to deal with the issues and pass on the concern and ensure that every effort is made to provide all the services necessary and that we avoid these types of circumstances. But recognizing, as I said earlier, that over the course of any given day thousands of Northerners successfully go through the doors of health centres. We have to be concerned about those situations that the Member has...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. If I could refer the Member to clause 4, that lays out some of the processes that are going to be available to deal with and interact with the public, get public feedback to provide direction and feedback on performance. The topic of holding public meetings to review investment activities in the performance of the fund. The monitoring of the performance. There will be an opportunity through that process to have public input. Of course, there’s always the opportunity through MLAs and through committees as well.

The issue is not so much, in my opinion, the need for additional resources. It’s to try to fill the positions that are already there to avoid the circumstances, that the Member talked about in his statement, where there’s lack of services. The small communities tend to not get the services that they’re expecting on a regular basis, which is a gap that we try to avoid. Thank you.

In regard to Mr. Beaulieu’s comments and some of the MLA for Kam Lake, Mr. Ramsay, I think, yes, we have far more needs than we have resources from now as far into the future as we could plan we will need every cent we have. If we just want to keep spending everything we have, our capital demands everybody knows are far in excess of the capital budget for next year. Something like half a billion a year versus $75 million, not to mention our program needs. So I would suggest that we have to do both; that we plan for our employees, we plan for pension funds, superannuation, we plan for the...