Bill Braden

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yesterday afternoon I was able to, in my Member’s statement, give a quick sense of where I felt this budget will take us and, after a day’s reflection and a good night’s sleep on it, I can certainly say that I feel better as an MLA in this Assembly this year or today looking forward, than I did a year ago.

The fiscal picture has become much more certain for us and, to our credit and our benefit, we are able to see the vast majority of our programs maintained. We are able to see finally, after years and years of being choked back, Madam Chair, our capital investment and...

Mr. Speaker, the Premier’s remarks are, of course, appropriate and encouraging, but I think there are things we need to do to move this along. The social agencies have been the ones who have been really at the plate trying to bring our attention to their concerns. What are we going to do to assist them in their drastically underfunded and under-resourced capacity to really be a player? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

 Good morning.  Thank you, Mr. Speaker.  I listened with a great deal of interest, and I think a number of people across the Northwest Territories did this morning, to the CBC Radio interview with Randy Henderson and Anna Maria Tremonte and the former Justice Thomas Berger when they visited the question:  Is the NWT ready now for the Mackenzie Valley pipeline?  Is now the right time for the Mackenzie pipeline?

The survey, over the course of 40 minutes of phone-in air time, was obviously not scientific or all-encompassing, but it gave a very fascinating snapshot of where the mood may be today. ...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister of Finance, Mr. Roland, and they continue from the information we heard this afternoon on our budget. Mr. Speaker, the area that I would like to explore a little bit relates to our formula financing arrangement with the federal government. We are a billion dollar government. According to the document released this afternoon, almost three-quarters of that, or about $725 million, will come from Ottawa through the formula financing deal, Mr. Speaker.

Now, this has caused us problems in the past and, through the Department of Finance in...

A short supplementary, Mr. Speaker. Would the Minister be able to release any of the information about the mandate, criteria or baselines that we believe are important to the outcome of this? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, when the Minister says that we will definitely be plugging in, does that mean that we have a direct voice on this panel? Some other aspect of this was, are we sharing this with our sister territories, Yukon and Nunavut? Is everybody into the same hopper here, and experiencing the same procedure here? That is where I am going, Mr. Speaker. I am not quite certain just how involved and how close we are going to be to the process and the outcome. Thank you.

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. My congratulations, too, to the Tlicho people for their hard earned victory.

---Applause

Today is also budget day here, of course, Mr. Speaker, and in a quick summary here -- keeping score, if you will -- as Minister Roland was reading us the news, I have more points on the good news side of my ballot than on the bad news side, Mr. Speaker.

Just to give a quick response to a couple of the highlights that I’ve heard, we will take the bad news side, Mr. Speaker. I will keep coming back to the housing agenda. The budget contains some five paragraphs of discussion about...

Mr. Speaker, we have had troubles over the last four or five years here anticipating that we were going to have revenue shortfalls given the growth in our economy and the needs of our social side, we continue to have some pretty aggressive budgets. Every year we were facing a debt wall and doom and gloom. Every year along came some kind of last-minute rescue package for us; thank goodness. But it is not a very good way to govern a place. It is not a great way to run a railroad. What I would like to know is, given the continued uncertainty, we really don’t know where our formula financing...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I guess I would like to underscore for the Minister and get his response, if he cares to, on the issue of the lack of land, as I am told no publicly available land. How can developers make decisions? We are quickly coming up to the spring and summer construction season. If we don’t know whether or not we can get land in a certain time frame, how can these decisions be made? This is the crunch that the City of Yellowknife and developers are facing in Yellowknife right now, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In terms of the protocol and exercising this Interim Measures Agreement, is it working out to everyone’s satisfaction? Are we able to see through this clear management of the handing over of land to communities? Is this agreement working the way it should? Thank you.