Bob Bromley

We spend a lot of time and money dealing with the symptoms of poverty: $5 million approved just yesterday to top up payments for child placements outside the NWT, child protection orders resulting from neglect, high rates of alcoholism. These are all symptoms of poverty. We need to deal with the root cause itself: poverty. Substantive changes in income support such as those suggested will yield returns on such investments through savings in education, health and social services and corrections, and enhance economic activity.

I will have questions.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to table two documents. The first is called “Income Security for all Canadians.” The second is an infographic that has a lot of good stuff in it, called “The Case for a Guaranteed Income – Lifting People from Poverty: Fairly, Efficiently and Effectively.” Mahsi.

Thank you. I think there are a lot of people out there that could make suggestions that are caught in these poverty traps, but I’ll take the Minister’s offer and work with him on that.

I know the Minister and I have the same goal here, so I hope he takes these points as constructive and friendly suggestions.

Would the Minister commit to including the six recommendations I made this morning on income support in the anti-poverty work that he is doing? Mahsi.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to follow up on my Member’s statement with questions for the Minister of the social envelope today, Minister Abernethy. The Minister has been working hard on an Anti-Poverty Strategy and more recently an Anti-Poverty Action Plan. The strategy and plan are based around five pillars.

Could the Minister explain which pillar addresses the poverty traps that are built into our income security programs that I’ve been talking about for the last three days? Mahsi.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I understand a good proportion of this is due to the 7 percent increase in electrical rates. This is a formula we have known several years in advance; this is a good example of my perplexity of why we are dealing with this in a supp when we know well ahead of time that we are having a 7 percent increase in our electrical rates. I don’t doubt that there are other factors involved here, but clearly a big proportion of that is the 7 percent increase, a substantive increase as we’ve had for the last three years. We know we are going to have a 5 percent increase next year...

Thank you. I’d appreciate it if that could be provided to the House and tabled. Why the increase here?

I think many entities would budget with this in mind. If the supplementary reserve is insufficient, let’s change it. But what happens is we end up stealing from Peter to pay Paul here when in fact we could allocate responsibly right in the beginning. As I say, this degree of correction is unacceptable in my mind. Many of these things, as I say, are predictable and pretty well known. This government’s been operating a long time.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Unfortunately, this expenditure will drive us well beyond our supplementary reserve. In fact, it blows it right out of the water. In the supportive documents, I keep seeing the word shortfall. What’s happened here is we have done a very shoddy job on budgeting. This is riddled with examples of entirely predictable costs and it reflects to me a really irresponsible approach to budgeting in the first place, and here we are again putting our supplementary reserve into major deficit. This isn’t the first time this has been brought up. We have been bringing this up repeatedly...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I believe my amendment to the amendment is now before the House, but I will repeat it.

I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Frame Lake, that the amendment to Motion 13-17(5) be amended by adding the following after the phrase “first paragraph after the resolution portion of the motion”: and replacing them with the words “before that group begins in that community”. I would like to speak to the motion, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I see this is a request for Medical Travel Program costs. Again, I’m disappointed here. Basically we have poured in, in both during the 16th and 17th Assemblies, tens of millions of dollars to increase the efficiency of our medical travel system. Specifically on electronic medical records, telehealth, call forward physician access, community pharmaceutical supplies, community electronic imaging capacity. I am just again wondering what’s happening here on the increasing costs that we’re seeing, or is it a budgeting issue? I understand that Stanton Territorial Hospital...