Michael Miltenberger

Thank you, Madam Chair. The payback is estimated to be five years, and yes, with the solar technology available, when they’ve measured the technology available to measure the benefits, we’ll be looking to do that so we can learn from this investment. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is not a base adjustment to the contract per se. The contract, as the Minister pointed out, has been fairly consistent in its cost. What this is, is an adjustment to the program area in the budget of the Beaufort-Delta Health and Social Services where they had a certain amount of money for a contract that was inadequate to the tune of $547,000, roughly, and has helped contribute to the accumulated debt of the authority. I’ll ask Minister Beaulieu to speak to the… He already mentioned it, but I’ll ask if maybe he’ll go over the cost over the last number of years...

Yes, Madam Chair.

Yes, they absorb the costs that contributed to their deficit reaching the point where we need to recognize it and do this base adjustment. But it’s because they didn’t have the appropriate amount of funding in their budget to cover that cost.

Thank you. What I did say was that we are of the mind, as a government, that it’s not an appropriate time to be adding new tax burdens onto Northerners, that we struggle with cost of living issues in all of our communities, that it’s a challenge to businesses as well. So what we want to foster is a strong economy, which will give us more revenue as opposed to us as a government putting more taxes out there. So our focus has been on trying to put in infrastructure, look at how we do business to be as supportive as possible in an economically and environmentally sustainable way to encourage...

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Monfwi, that Bill 8, An Act to Amend the Securities Act, be read for the third time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you. This has been an interesting exercise and there’s a number of key perspectives that we were looking for. We wanted feedback from the people of the Northwest Territories. We want to see what kind of responses we can get in terms of the things we’re now doing, which in this case confirm the focus that this Assembly has, for example, on prevention and the need to put more money into prevention, the need to sort out red tape, duplication program overlap, the need to look at how we add more money to our infrastructure budget. The other big issue is, of course, the support for sustainable...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the Member’s concern. One of the impacts on our current circumstance was the $10 million we put into this project a number of months ago. The money we spent that we didn’t anticipate was extra money on the bridge, we spent extra money on a number of different areas. But we appreciate the Member’s concern. We are still going to hit our fiscal targets, as we laid out in our fiscal plan to the Members. Thank you.

As we approach this project, the decisions made to ask for the funds in increments so that we would be reporting back to the Legislature and justifying the expenses because of the interest and concern about the project, as opposed to asking for a large amount of money and then at some point in the future coming back. We chose to come forward on an as-required basis so that we would always be before the House as a check and balance to make sure Members were fully engaged. When we conclude this final $2 million worth of work, we will have the information we need to put a package before this...

Madam Chair, can I ask the Member to give me the number, how much more or less it is than the numbers before us, without quoting the exact number?

---Laughter