Michael Miltenberger

As I indicated, this money is new money. It’s not money coming out of the various school boards. Should the money not be approved, then Education, Culture and Employment would be absorbing that cost from their existing budget.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have with me Mike Aumond, deputy minister of Finance; and Mr. Olin Lovely, director of the Management Board Secretariat. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have captured all the numbers that we think are going to be there between now and the end of March. But as I indicated earlier, in order to err on the side of caution and to make sure that we have enough room to respond and to keep the government operational, we’re going to come forward with a request, through legislation, to increase that amount from $275 million to $300 million. Thank you.

We, of course, whenever possible, share as fully as we can as a matter of practice with internal audits. There is sometimes highly sensitive, sometimes personnel information, sometimes information that may form the basis for a criminal investigation, so I am unable to commit to the request by the Member. Thank you.

I would encourage the Member to think back that we manage a $1.8 billion budget. We have supps on a regular basis and nearly 100 percent of the time, over 99 percent of the time the system works. We have an issue with this supplementary appropriation, which is a relatively small amount, as the Member said, that didn’t follow all the steps in the process, and we acknowledge that. There’s no plan to change the process because it’s a good process. There is a requirement and need to have the checks and balances and accountability to this Legislature and it’s why we’re here today laying this out...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Over the last three years with Inuvik’s troubles with their gas wells taking on water and the issue of using propane, between the Power Corp and the government, we’ve put in about $8 million to make sure we’ve tried to cushion the blow of the loss of the gas. We’ve switched the Power Corp initially to diesel; we switched our buildings back to diesel to make sure we freed up much cheaper gas to the people of Inuvik. On top of that we have a lot of programs for conservation, energy efficiencies, appliances, insulation, windows, which reduce your energy requirements. But...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the Member’s concern and his comments. If you look at the whole fiscal picture at the end of this Assembly or where we currently are now, I would say while we have challenges, it’s not as bleak as the Member would indicate and we are doing an enormous amount of very critical things like the $350 million project at Stanton. We’re discussing a $314 million capital plan, which we bumped up $50 million this year. So there are enormous challenges for a government this size, for a territory this large with the demands as many and varied as they are.

This...

Yes, I do, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In regards to the second part of the motion, we of course are going to be looking at the fire crews. We had very good fortune and a good response when we started training emergency firefighters, and the issue of are we adequately staffed on the ground is one we’re going to look at as part of our comprehensive annual review that we do. So we are going to work on that.

In relation with community firefighters, fighting residential fires is one that we haven’t explored that much, but we definitely are going to be looking at are we staffed up to the right degree with the...

Yes, Mr. Chair. Thank you.