Robert C. McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First, I need to preface anything I say about the Canada Winter Games by stating that I can’t speak for the will of the House, its Members, committees, or the actions of future government. It is understood that a games bid by the City of Yellowknife would require the GNWT to support its share of the operational infrastructure requirements as per the standard Canada Winter Games tri-party agreement. If the City makes a bid, the GNWT will mobilize our departments to come up with potential financing models to meet the GNWT funding obligations. Our initial take was that...

I can actually ask the Member that question in his former role, so I've got to be careful what I say here.

---Laughter

Our regional staff are all very involved in the Arctic Winter Games trials and the selection of athletes. It's actually a part of what they do and it’s part of what they believe in, supporting the athletes that are getting out there, so they would play a role in helping to organize trials and working to get athletes to the next level.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My understanding is that they do have local and regional trials, and if they make it through the regional trials, if they get to the territorial trials, usually there's some criteria in place. I think if there's an international trip like there is at this particular Arctic Winter Games, there's an expectation that they would have passport applications and the ability to access passports as well. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

We are working on the options now, and for me to say anything in here about those options would pre-empt our consultation with committee. We are going to have our meetings with committee and then through the business planning process, committee will have an opportunity for feedback to the government before we develop our main estimates for the May/June session. Committee will have an opportunity to see what some of the plans are for the upcoming budget. Then, during the business planning or the budget process, we have a number of different options in place as far as letting everyone know if...

Decisive action is ensuring that our expenditures don't run away from the revenue that we're able to generate, and we have tasked our officials with putting some of the options together. They will share them with Cabinet, and I will share them with committee. Depending on some of the direction that we take, they will come forward in the May/June budget cycle.

I will follow up with Sport North and have a discussion with them as to the criteria that they use for the selection of their mission staff, and again, they are paying attention to the conversation that we're having in here today, so I'm sure that they will take steps to ensure that there's a greater regional balance and small community balance in the future.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we have an agreement with Sport North that manages our games. They put a call out for advertisements in the paper for mission staff for the games that are coming up. Apparently, this year they had 80 applications, and they chose them. My understanding is they wanted to get a bit of a regional balance and that too, so that's the process that they use for the selection of mission staff.

In the last number of years we've had to use some short-term borrowing, usually beginning of the fall, as our expenditures continue to out-strip our revenues. This is not an option that we want to use too often. I mean, the option's there, we will take advantage of it, but our goal at the end of the day is to ensure that our expenditures don't exceed our revenue.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We will be tabling a revenue options paper early in this session that we had an opportunity to share with Committee, and it points out a number of options we're looking at as far as increasing our revenue.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following three documents entitled “Interim Estimates, 2016-2017”; “Supplementary Estimates (Infrastructure Expenditures), No. 4, 2015-2016”; and “Supplementary Estimates (Operations Expenditures), No. 3, 2015-2016.” Thank you, Mr. Speaker.