Bob Bromley

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just to be clear, is that for total costs for health care services for residents outside the NWT?

Charles now owes money for child care and still does not have enough to feed his family. I wish I could say this story has a happy ending, but Charles is having a hard time seeing a way out.

This is what I mean when I talk about poverty traps. Our Income Security programs are inadequate and the built-in clawbacks create a disincentive to work. I must point out again, that rather than providing the stable home children need to succeed, living in a poverty trap means toxic stress, leading to delays in early childhood development that will, sadly, be costly for all and for lifetimes.

This morning I...

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...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This phrase is awkward, but it is the kernel of the motion, I believe. I think what Mr. Menicoche is saying, and I agree, is we don’t want the whole program stopped if some community, JK group, doesn’t have an ECE worker. It’s just that that particular JK group should not go ahead until there is an early childhood education worker. On that basis, Mr. Chair, I would like to propose an amendment to the amendment. Mahsi.

Thanks for that information. It sounds like we’re never allowed to get ahead. We’re allowed to count for what the actual costs are this year through this unfortunate process, but wouldn’t it be great if we could do it at the beginning of the year so that we actually knew what our costs were roughly? We might even feed back a few thousand bucks at the end of the year, who knows? But I would be happy with a conservative estimate of increases based on our experience. It would just greatly reduce these sorts of costs, or at least adjustments. Thank you.