Bill Braden

Mr. Chairman, I move we report progress.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a general question about the fiscal year and I hope it is appropriate that I ask it now. When we set up each year's budget, Mr. Chairman, there is a supplementary reserve and the question that I wanted to put to the Finance Minister now that we are cleaning up the books from the past fiscal year, how did we do on our supplementary reserve? Did we come in sort of on or under budget? Have we exceeded it? What is the year-end report on our supplementary reserve? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Roughly $2 million in fees out of a total $10 million exposure. Excuse me, Mr. Chairman, how much of that $2 million in fees is staying with northern-based companies; you know, receivers or auditors? Can we at least say that we are retaining some of this here? Hopefully most if not all of it, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To the appropriation here regarding our loss on the diamond turnover here, I guess it really illustrates that this is a new enterprise in Canada and a risky one. There was a quick, steep learning curve. Perhaps is has plateaued a little bit now, but as we can see with these numbers here, Mr. Chairman, our government is still learning and obviously learning the hard way, the very hard way, about going into these kind of ventures.

As an MLA here in the city and in the territory, Mr. Chairman, I am a supporter of governments going into areas where private enterprise...

Mahsi, Madam Speaker. I will continue with questions for the Minister of Health and Social Services on the issue of the TTC. Madam Speaker, tenacity and perseverance are very much skills to be admired at the ministerial level. That’s one of the reasons I had confidence in making sure that Mr. Miltenberger went in there and I still have confidence in him and his capacity. You know something, Madam Speaker, flexibility and having an open mind are qualities that are equally important in having a Minister there and this is where I would like to see the Minister demonstrate this quality.

The...

We have established a convention and a belief as part of the process of consensus that we will work with each other on significant changes like this. I will say it again and again and again, we were denied the access, involvement and input to this kind of process in this decision. It was, indeed, something that was out there as a very viable idea. We came back into this House just last week and we find out that this is a done deal. This is where this government has let us down and it’s letting this community down. The government must rescind its desire or its program to move this facility...

Madam Speaker, we really are at a standoff at this point. We must come back to the whole premise of when a major change is made to a piece of social delivery or piece of social delivery infrastructure, that there are significant consequences. The Minister will not accept this, but we are seeing and hearing an overwhelming body of information and very sincere expressions from professionals about what this will cause. Madam Speaker, our point to the Minister has been to show us the plan, to show that the department understands and is knowledgeable about the consequences. We have not seen that...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. For some great coincidence our exchange students who are in Yellowknife this year are nicely divided among all seven Yellowknife ridings. In my riding of Great Slave, I would like to introduce Mr. Scott Alltree from New Zealand who is hosted by the Miller family.

---Applause

Welcome, Scott.

Thank you. I guess in sort of percentage terms, Mr. Voytilla supplied some numbers here. I would just like to get a sense of the ratio or portion percentage-wise how much did we go over? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To return briefly, Mr. Chairman, to the diamond portion of this. The Minister just explained that regrettably it seems the majority if not all of these fees are going to non-resident, non-registered businesses that aren't based here. That is just really a shame. Even when things go wrong, you can't keep some of this money with our own professionals.

I guess what I'm seeing here, Mr. Chairman, certainly going into some avenues of business carries risk, but that, depending on how we handle it, can be extremely expensive. Receivership is a difficult and expensive way...