Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Under this order of the day last year, I talked about the way this Assembly had been conducting its budgetary business up to that point. Something that was a problem for me, and I wanted to see how we could address it, was the relative secrecy by which this Assembly goes about building its budgetary plans, business plans for the departments. I say relative secrecy compared to the way most other jurisdictions in Canada do this, Mr. Speaker, especially through the committee process.

Our committees here in our Legislature, and this is by our collective consensus, have largely been, and continue to largely be, behind closed doors. But I was very pleased to see that with the particular budget process that we’re engaged in right now, there has been a change in the way we do business; that the Members on the regular side and the standing committees engaged in a very extensive pre-budget consultation not in every community of the NWT, Mr. Speaker, but in quite a number of them, in September and that was a widely accepted, and very much appreciated, and very useful and relevant to the kind of work we want to do.

The way the public, the non-government organizations, the communities regarded our request, we were looking for input, ideas on where our priorities and our spending should be. We got good feedback and I think this is going to be a regular part of the way we do business, at least for the budget, Mr. Speaker.

We’ve also changed in this Assembly -- we just started it this week -- the number of hours that we put into budget process. We’ve changed the orders and the way we manage some of our other processes and procedures, Mr. Speaker. I know in a number of areas these changes to our routine have not come easily. Certainly change is never easy anywhere, but I do hope that we will continue to try these new processes for the balance of this budget session because of one very significant aspect to it and it goes back to why we are doing these pre-budget consultations. Why do we want to open up our committee process? It’s to make the business of this Assembly, the kind of discussion, deliberation and debate that we have more accessible, more open, and more transparent to the voters and to the constituents. By changing at least the hours of the way we do business, more people are able to see what we have, what we do, and how we do it. I think this is going to make for better government, better decision-making and better accountability by us for our constituents and for the Members of Cabinet and the stewards of our budgetary process.

Mr. Speaker, one other point I wanted to make with regard to the budget address itself that Mr. Roland gave us last week, relates to the brevity of the address compared to other years. Mr. Speaker, the address this session was only 10 pages in the book. It took a little under half-an-hour to read. In my time in this Assembly, the budget address has been at least twice as long and contained a lot more detail on various departments, initiatives, priorities and results, the whole context of what we do.

The budget address is a significant communication tool for this Assembly, for this government. While Mr. Roland declared that it was his intent this year to make the budget address more of a political message to the newly elected federal government -- and indeed he did so -- I haven’t counted it up here, but there are numerous references to Mr Harper and the new Tory government -- it fell far short of, as I say, one of the main communication tools that we should be using to help our people understand and know what’s going on.

In that address, there is lots of attention focussed on delivering a political message. The gallery is full here, Mr. Speaker, as you know. A lot tune into the broadcasts to see what is on our agenda. When we miss the opportunity to inform them of that, when we have their ear and we have their attention, I think we have let our people down to some extent.

At the risk of being accused of being old fashioned, Mr. Speaker, I would say please, next time around, I would very much like to welcome the return by the Finance Minister of a full and detailed budget address, because that is when we do have people’s attention and what they are anticipating. Let’s make it less a political messenger than a communicator of information to our people. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.