Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Well, if they like that, they'll like this one. Exactly what I'm saying, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, keeping people dependent should have been the title of this budget address. Sadness and despair abound, Mr. Speaker. You know, when I look around, I think to myself if I had written this budget, I would have taken a Doug Ford or a Wab Kinew approach. We'd be talking about how exciting times could be here in the North. We'd be talking about the rollout of the national defence spending that potentially is coming. I know it's not here yet, but we'd be talking about that. As a matter of fact, that'd be the first line, national defence spending, thank God, because, frankly, we had no other idea how to save ourselves. And close the budget. I mean, honestly, Mr. Speaker, opportunity and empowerment should be the speech. I actually decided to go and watch a couple opening addresses of other provincial speeches just to get a sense of tone. I mean, my goodness, Mr. Speaker, you can go coast to coast and how exciting they are about what an opportunity. This was not what I heard today.
Mr. Speaker, it feels often like our budget address speeches of course are all about what we can't do. I suggest let's turn that around and say this is why we're going to do it. Mr. Speaker, a government budget here, in all fairness, is not consensus in the sense of its highest form.
Now, it's true the government's going to say, well, we talked to you and we showed you the budget. Yes, that is true, Mr. Speaker. That is a fact, and let's get that out of the way. But showing up minutes before midnight and saying what do you think, I can assure you the tabled budget later today will be exactly what we were shown just, say, minutes before on the clock as they say. Mr. Speaker, if it was true consensus, the Finance Minister and their cabal of expertise and knowledge people would be showing up and saying what makes a difference from your view in the economy? How do you think we can empower people in the economy? How do you think we can get Northerners standing on their own, feeling good about where they are, where they're from, being part of the North, being part of the success of the North? Mr. Speaker, that would be true consensus about building budgets.
We'd be having, you know, whether it's a big conversation or a minor conversation in the fall, saying here are some ideas to stimulate the economy, make people healthier, stronger, faster, just like the 6 Million Dollar Man, Mr. Speaker - build them stronger, faster.
Mr. Speaker, to be fair, it is a frustrating process. Often on this side of the House, it feels as if the government is so tone deaf. When it comes to Ministers showing up with their budgets and they say well, it's 99.99 percent done, what do you think? Well, that's like a parent telling their kid we're going to Disney World, tickets are booked, hotel's booked, all paid for. What do you think? Well, of course, you know, like, there's no discussion. You're being told this is how it rolls out.
Mr. Speaker, Members need wins. I have told this Premier for over 807 days Members need to feel like we're part of the process and telling us at the last -- coming to us at the last minute and saying what do you think is not part of the process, Mr. Speaker. With 606 days approximately left in this term, Mr. Speaker, I suspect that trend will not change. I suspect Cabinet will continue to decide who they're working with and who they're not working with. We have positive suggestions.
Mr. Speaker, over a year ago, not quite two years ago, I was saying about the opportunity in national defence and the Premier was saying, my goodness, they know where we are. Our budget should be fully rolled out saying how we're going to rise to those occasions. That's why I rose yesterday to talk to the Minister of lands saying how are we going to dedicate ourselves to meet this rising potential investment. We're going to have a tsunami of investment. There's our hope. There's our opportunity. I can tell you -- and I'm sorry, I wish it was in every single region, but I am going to say Inuvik people are going to be eating, and they're going to be eating well because of that $5 million investment. Yellowknife -- billion. Billions. See? I'm so excited. It's billions.
Yellowknife, the region, is going to see $5 billion of investment. People are going to be eating. We need territorial programs. That's why I talked today this budget should be focusing on other opportunities. As I tried to highlight, Carney says I like multifaceted projects. We could be building our economy with the Sahtu using the Mackenzie Valley Highway and tying that potentially -- and I don't want to send the wrong message to people here -- potentially asking Alberta could we work and maybe find a corridor for their oil that's landlocked. It was a vision Bob McLeod, former Premier of the Northwest Territories, always had. Could we tap into opportunities like that, revive that, create economies. I mean, we wouldn't be building it. It'd be up to them saying we're open for business. Stuff like that brings economic opportunity from the Deh Cho through the Sahtu up into the Mackenzie Delta area, Inuvik, even Nunakput where they'd put a -- you know, put a facility to offload it. All of a sudden we're talking about opportunities. Where are these in our budget, Mr. Speaker?
Mr. Speaker, I have -- I would have liked to have seen in the budget address -- although I wish Cabinet wouldn't sort of throw away its opportunities here. If the budget had said to me well, you know, and by the way on page 4 we're going to squeeze in a name, the Whitford Building on the 50th Street, that would have made me happy. But, you know, they offloaded their opportunity to make some choices to a committee while this budget talks about trying -- this budget says well, we're going to do boilerplate stuff but nothing innovative or exciting.
I have to be fair. I have to be fair, Mr. Speaker. I've got to say something nice, of course, about the budget. I do like the 24-hour lab services, and I think the cover picture's really nice. And that said -- that said, I would have liked to have seen and heard how the government is going to eliminate the senior envoy position and how they're going to respond to this so-called everyone loves the 440,000 concierge service that picks someone up at the airport, drives them to their -- Mr. Speaker, this budget could have been smarter with its resources under the Premier's office to say if the need is people want to feel warm and fuzzy, we'll find someone to make them feel warm and fuzzy.
Mr. Speaker, but no, this budget doesn't say that. It doesn't talk about efficiencies. Mr. Speaker, we could talk about stimulating the community economy. I think as my colleague from Inuvik had pointed out, he said it takes too long to transfer land if you even get land. The City of Yellowknife constantly talks about how they have businesses and development wanting to spend money here and new money coming to town. In essence, it's like a domino effect. They come here, they bring cash, they invest, they hire people, they spend more money, more money's being spent on more money, and it's getting new money in the territory, people are working. People are working. This budget has an opportunity to make these announcements and saying how we're going to rewrite the way we do things.
Mr. Speaker, it's a huge, huge missed opportunity. And, again, from the page of my two favourite premiers -- currently, that is -- which is Doug Ford and Wab Kinew, I could hear them say if they were planning a budget address they'd be talking about how bringing Aurora College into the future, not how it's locked in the past. They'd be talking about how we're getting this done in six months, not six years. This government, I wish they would be talking about in the Doug Ford/Wab Kinew way about how they're bringing 500 new jobs to the territory and how they're protecting 500 to a thousand jobs we're losing in our diamond sector. Rather than watching those diamond mines shutter, they'd be saying we're creating an economic environment to help make sure that there's prosperity for everyone.
Mr. Speaker, I worry that this government budget, written by the senior mandarins of our government, all control the outcome long before we even got here.
Mr. Speaker, this is an opportunity to put a wartime effort into what we need to do - take care of our people, take care of the North, inspire people to be here and want to stay here. I have met long-term Northerners that say we can no longer afford to be here. I know people I've known my whole life saying there isn't a future here. And I keep trying to tell them there is. I can't be selling this message alone. Mr. Speaker, I think there's so many things that we could be doing.
Mr. Speaker, all we often hear is about well, we're doing the best we can, we're shuffling the resources down. There's a point about maybe eliminating a few positions but we're just -- we're eliminating empty ones and all of these kinds of things, but the net outcome is we got more. I mean, to me, if they want to be efficient, we don't need the budget to do that. They could be doing that all the time if we need to be efficient with our resources. And maybe that's the question, is how do we do that. But, Mr. Speaker, building our budget and our territory's future around being lucky isn't a plan. I mean, let's be honest -- and I am going to go back to the beginning, not from the start but to the beginning point which is, I mean, we are so lucky the federal defence department is looking at spending money here. If it wasn't for that luck, I don't know what this budget would be telling us. But then I searched the Finance Minister's speech online, like I pulled it up, I mean, there's such a micro even acknowledgement about the challenges in the Arctic that it should be, like I said, at the very beginning say national defence money, thank God, because we needed it. Because I don't know what we'd do otherwise.
Mr. Speaker, I want to bring this towards a close, not close yet. But, you know, I often feel like the government is missing the bigger picture. It's all about bureaucratic process, where the budget should really be about how do we prevent things. The analogy I am going to give you really matters, and I hope it sinks in.
You know, in Hay River when they start pulling up the railway ties and the rail lines and whatnot, well, let's face it. They're not bringing the train back. That should be a stark, cold message. And we should be asking ourselves how do we stop them from pulling up the ties and the rails and that stuff. In the Sahtu and Norman Wells, when they say they're packing up, that's scary. So we should be talking about how do we resurge excitement in our economy. And this is the one time a year we can do this, by saying we're going to tap into the public sector. The GNWT isn't going to try to cannibalise their employment and expertise for the fact oh, we just have to fill out a few jobs. We should be doing the reverse, finding ways to stimulate them. I mean, look to the east, look to the west. The economies are on fire, Mr. Speaker.
The mining sector is depressing, our investment is shrinking, our economics are depressing, but our two sister territories are busier than ever. So why isn't the government, through its strategy, saying here this budget is going to be focused on how we revive the mineral sector? That is going to be the way to get us out of this death spiral of financial woe. Mr. Speaker, we are going to use this budget to empower people, to get more people off social assistance into jobs to become contributors. And I want to be clear I believe in being contributors. Now, that doesn't mean everybody has to do exactly the same as everyone else. But we're all a team. Top to bottom, north to south, we all have to work together.
Mr. Speaker, this government should be talking about, you know what, the Taltson may or may not be coming, it's so far away. When we hear oh, the economics of bringing power to lower the power and cost of living in the Northwest Territories really could be coming from somewhere like High Level, maybe through a P3 project. You know, there's better ways or maybe different ways. And to be clear, when I got elected in 2003, we were talking about the Taltson then. That's 23 years ago. So much has passed. My goodness, we could have built the line to High Level two or three times and back. And I will tell you the fact is that if the Yukon says it's smarter to bring power in from BC, maybe we should be asking ourselves the same question.
Mr. Speaker, in closing, I want to point out that this budget is short on vision and high on maintenance, and status quo seems the way to go. But all I know is if this was a Doug Ford budget, if this is a Wab Kinew budget, we'd be hearing about how they roll it out, roll out the red carpet and say we are going to rise to industry needs that bring money, bring jobs, bring investment, bring opportunity. But no, we missed the opportunity of this budget to be selling big projects. And I look to Premier Tim Houston of Nova Scotia and when they say they want to do projects, they put the fullness of effort into it. I've seen their wind west proposal. It's sell, sell, sell an opportunity. This budget so far is safe, safe, safe, and hopefully nobody will move and nobody will get hurt. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member from Yellowknife Centre. Replies to the budget address, day 1 of 7. Acknowledgements.
Colleagues, we're going to take a short break to give the translators a break because we're going into oral questions and then we'll be going there, so we're going to have a short break. Thank you.
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