Michael Miltenberger

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is part of the adjustment to follow up on the commitment made in this House to return the resources and the public housing rental scale operations and authority back to the Housing Corporation. This is part of the cost. In the ensuing years, of course, there’s been other forced growth pressures that have resulted in what is before this House today. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As I have indicated in committee, the budget that is there for fire suppression, pre-suppression and fire suppression, allows us to get to the early stages of fire season and then we know with certainty that we’ll have to come back if there’s any type of activity that’s going on other than having rain every day.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is going to give us the baseline information to hopefully track a positive impact of the changes that are coming with the Electrical Rate Review and the changes to the rates, especially in the thermal communities. In particular the interest, of course, is to track things like food basket costs. The plan is to use the schedule laid out and see if that will deal with the adequacy.

Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’m here to present Supplementary Estimates (Infrastructure Expenditures), No. 5, 2009-2010. This document outlines a decrease of $15 million for operations expenditures and a corresponding increase of $15 million for capital investment expenditures in the 2009-2010 fiscal year.

There is only one item in the supplementary estimates, a $15 million transfer between infrastructure contributions and capital investment expenditures for the Department of Transportation to account for the Deh Cho Bridge as a GNWT asset. There is no financial impact on government operations as...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t have that specific piece of information before me. I can commit to get it for the Member.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There is work underway. There was a backlog identified as of September 10, 2010, of 1,820 outstanding pay issues. There’s been work to reduce that. As of September 27th, they whittled that number down to 1,400.

There is work underway on all aspects of the Human Resources mandate to address the various problems that have been identified.

Mr. Chairman, I would have to disagree with the Member. I believe, from all my experience, that the quality of health care in the Northwest Territories, in my opinion, is second to none in the country. We have benefits, we have access, we have programs that other jurisdictions could only dream about and wished they had. The issue and the challenge... And there’s not a jurisdiction in this country, there’s not a jurisdiction in the world that is not dealing with the pressure of escalating health care costs. With us, we’re talking Health and Social Services, $300-and-some million. It’s about 30...

Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, it’s part of the conscious decision by the government, in many cases, to fund at the levels that are there, and if there’s an overage, then the department comes back. Over time, the practice has been to avoid giving full budgets based on estimates. There was a concern in terms of accountability and the difficulty in being able to coffer the money and get it back, should those estimates come in under what was voted.

The preference and the practice have been, so that there is greater accountability not only in Health but, for example, ENR and fire budgets, there’s a base budget and...