Thank you, Madam Chair. I am here to present Supplementary Estimates (Operations Expenditures), No. 3, 2011-2012. This document outlines an increase of $14.817 million in operations expenditures for the 2011-2012 fiscal year.
The major items included in the supplementary estimates are:
$3.335 million for the Department of Health and Social Services to provide contribution funding to the Beaufort-Delta Health and Social Services Authority and the Stanton Territorial Health Authority for extraordinary costs that contributed to the accumulated deficits in these authorities. This amount will be fully offset by accumulated operating surpluses in other health and social services authorities.
$2.938 million for the Department of Health and Social Services to provide contribution funding to the Stanton Territorial Health Authority for costs associated with the purchase of blood products from Canadian Blood Services.
$2.126 million for the Department of Health and Social Services for increased costs associated with children in residential care outside of the Northwest Territories.
$1.739 million for the NWT Housing Corporation to fund increases in the costs for utilities in public housing units.
$944,000 for the Department of Education, Culture and Employment to fund the projected shortfall in the Income Assistance Program for the 2011-12 fiscal year.
$835,000 for the Department of Education, Culture and Employment to fund the increased costs in the Student Financial Assistance Program.
I am prepared to review the details of the supplementary estimates document.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. I’d now like to ask the Minister if he’d like to bring witnesses into the Chamber.
Yes, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Does committee agree?
Agreed.
Agreed. Thank you. I’ll ask the Sergeant-at-Arms to escort the witnesses to the table.
Thank you. Minister Miltenberger, would you please introduce your witnesses for the record, and we’ll be watching to see if you get Mr. Kalgutkar’s title right. Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I have with me from Finance, Mr. Mike Aumond; and Mr. Sandy Kalgutkar, deputy secretary to the Financial Management Board Secretariat.
Thank you very much. General comments from Members on the supplementary appropriation (operations expenditures). General comments? Thank you. I hear that detail over there. Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Madam Chair. The supplementary operations expenses, one of the things that I have is the amount of dollars that we are going to be approving for the Department of Health and Social Services, specifically the Beaufort-Delta and the Stanton Health Authority for the deficits these two hospitals are running.
Year after year we continue to bail out the authorities, and not in thousands of dollars but in the millions of dollars. I know that the department is working hard to address this issue and there have been many plans over the years on how they are going to work on some form of financial discipline to not have these deficits. It’s been almost a practice ever since I’ve been in the Legislative Assembly. Debt has continued to run high and it’s still running high. I’m not sure what causes these deficits to go so high. That hurts the small communities because we have money going into the Beaufort-Delta and Stanton to offset their deficits, so when we want to do some programs or services we are always told that there is no money. We continue to hear the same thing of no money for certain programs we want to see in our communities.
Case in point, we are seeing $3.3 million from this government going to staffing in the Beaufort, and we will continue to do that. Like I said before, the boards are working hard to address this issue and we keep throwing them lifelines to keep them afloat and not to go too badly into a deficit. There are probably some expenditures that are needed. I’m not too sure which ones.
It raises a concern for me, for the operation. Do we have it right with Stanton? Do we have it right with the Beaufort-Delta? Who’s managing their money? What things are we not picking up that they continue to go into deficit? Will we continue to bail them out year after year? The manager knows that they can count on the government to pass supplementaries to bail them out. Is that the message that we’re giving to these two health boards?
I understand other health boards are also in a deficit. Or is that the way we’re doing business in the Northwest Territories with health? With the costs, are we not under-budgeting? Something’s happening that we’re sending the message to these two boards. If this was a private business, they would be out of business. And we continue to bail them out year after year. This is not very healthy and probably our health care is not very healthy. I have a concern about that.
Madam Chair, we’re spending close to $3 million on blood services, blood products from the Canadian Blood Services. That’s a high cost also. Probably the people that we are spending this money on greatly need it. It’s probably saving lives right now, but it adds a huge cost to this government here. We’re spending over $2 million for children outside the Northwest Territories. I’m thinking that some of these services that the children are receiving outside the Territories we don’t have in the Northwest Territories, so we’ve got to spend it outside. Not to get into the details, but that’s a heck of a lot of money. I’m not too sure that there will be a day when we can bring these children back to the North.
I wanted to ask about the income support assistance that we have. The department’s asking close to a million dollars for a shortfall. Where was the shortfall? Is that part of the government’s operations that we budget for unexpected shortfalls, forced growth, the number of clients that we’re receiving? Is that why some people in my region are being refused when family members are asking to support them? Those are the kinds of questions that I have.
To get back to the almost $3 million for the blood services for the people that we need in the North, can’t we look at other ways where we could possibly look at a process where we can donate blood for these people? At this cost, can we pay people to give blood in the North? That’s about all I have to say, Madam Chair, with the general comments to this supplementary budget.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Minister Miltenberger.
Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member has raised a number of critical points. I would point out that Stanton and Inuvik are acute care facilities and I think there is a direct correlation to the struggles with their costs and the fact that they are running the most expensive health programs that can be offered in the health care system. I would point out, as well, the Member commented that if health was a private business it would out of business. I would suggest to the Member that if he wants to see what would happen with a private business, then he could look south of the border, the 49th parallel, and see where tens of millions of Americans don’t have any health care coverage because they can’t afford it, and the first question they ask when you come through the door is: What’s your health care coverage and where’s your credit card?
We have a system that is not perfect, that is expensive, but it is, I still think, overall a very good business. It provides critical programs. I know the Minister of Health will expand on some of these issues.
In regard to the blood services, blood services are past the day of just donating blood at the local health centre these days. Based on the Krever inquiry and all the things that happened with the tainted blood scandal, if the Member will think back a number of years, millions were spent on the inquiry and tens of millions of dollars were spent revamping the blood services system. The instance before us in the supp today is we have some very expensive blood products required by a small number of patients that is critical to their survival. That’s where that cost comes in.
I’ll now ask the Minister of Health if he wants to elaborate. I’ll ask later, Madam Chair, with your indulgence, if the Minister of ECE would speak to the income support question. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Minister Beaulieu.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I’ll add more to the Canadian Blood Service, blood and plasma protein products. The Canadian Blood Service is a non-profit, charitable organization that provides blood and blood supply products to Canadians. However, Health Canada is responsible for regulating the blood supply system. The high cost of this item really is, like the Minister of Finance indicated, it’s actually just two people, believe it or not, which consume a large part of this budget. Plasma protein products, there are only two people using that product and it resulted in a shortfall. The costs, the blood in 2010-11 is $1.7 million which resulted in almost $1.967 million shortfall. The total cost to the Canadian Blood Service in this actual cost was projected costs in 2011-12 for the rest of this year is $2.7 million. Again, that resulted in a shortfall of $1.97 million. The budget for this product is only $743,000. It is just the actual cost that is needed to provide blood to keep these individuals alive.
Authority deficits are attributed to several factors including historical funding levels and have not kept pace with the cost drivers and/or even inflation. The two authorities, as indicated by the Minister of Finance, are the two authorities that have hospitals. At this time although we are constantly reviewing the costs, we haven’t changed the funding models of the authorities so that some of the authorities do all come out with surpluses every year and then these two that have the hospitals do have deficits.
We are looking at trying to develop a long-term solution by amending authority funding to address these structural deficits at this time. At this time, what happens often is that clients are sent from a housing authority to the hospital. The hospital here or the hospital in Inuvik will pick up the cost for that client, so the client could be from another authority but ends up in one of the hospitals. The cost is picked up also.
In addition to that, the medical travel has been transferred to Stanton. Each time there is medical travel, a solution for the various health and social services authorities would be to put the individual on medical travel, so if he ends up here and then further on to Edmonton, then Stanton picks up that cost. Stanton also has that additional issue of dealing with the medical travel and that also runs into a deficit. I don’t have the actual number, but $3 million worth of deficit in medical travel comes to mind. Again, that is a result from all of the authorities and all of the clients right across the North that do need medical travel.
The residential southern placement of children, this is children who are… We have contractual obligations for children to receive services in the residential facilities that are in the South. Right now we have 49 children that are in residential southern facilities. That is a cost of over almost $5.3 million to house and provide service. The clients that are placed in southern residential facilities for various reasons range from long-term placements for lifelong disabilities to short-term placements for treatment or transitional programs related to mental health disorders and behavioural problems. There is quite a range there of some of the children on this list are there basically on a permanent basis; some are there and they will come back. The hope is that there wouldn’t be a lot of short-term treatment and sometimes there is a lot of short-term treatment. That number goes up. Like I said, the cost of that exceeded the budget by $1 million that the Member is seeing. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. Minister Lafferty.
Mahsi, Madam Chair. The income security, there has been an increase due to the downturn of our economy which increases a number of clients accessing income support across the North. They couldn’t find any full-time and part-time seasonal jobs, especially in the mining sector area. There have been some layoffs and their subcontractors as well. That is the information that we received from those industries. From April to November 2011, actual growth was around 3.8 percent, so when you put that into perspective, that is a shortfall of $944,000. That is the very reason why we are here as part of the process. Mahsi.
Thank you. General comments. On the list I have Ms. Bisaro, Mr. Bromley, Mr. Yakeleya. Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a number of general comments and then I will have questions when I get to each department.
In looking at the big picture, what we are presented with here, I certainly I have to say I have questions about the way that we do our budgeting. I have certainly said it before; I am sure I will say it again. Many of these expenses that are included in this supplementary appropriation, in my mind, are expenses which we could have or should have predicted. Certainly some of them are extraordinary, but I think we tend to underestimate when we estimate our expenses. There is almost a mindset that that is okay. We will lowball the expense number because we can always go back and get more money.
This is our third supplementary appropriation for the 2011-12 budget year. I know that there were some expenses which were not foreseen at the time that this particular budget was developed, things like changes in the Collective Agreement I think is one perhaps which might have had an impact and couldn’t have been foreseen. The documentation that we got from the Department of Finance indicates that many of these are forced growth expenditures. I look at the information we have and the indications that there has been an upward trend in costs and in usage in almost every area that was identified as forced growth. I think we really, as a government, could have done a better job of budgeting what we were going to encounter as expenses.
I have concerns similar to the ones expressed by my colleague Mr. Yakeleya around the amount of money that we are being required year after year to put into Stanton Territorial Health Authority and the Beaufort-Delta Health Authority. It indicates to me and I think the Minister kind of alluded to it, both Ministers, but we are not budgeting these two health authorities properly. We are consistently underfunding them. We are not evaluating the services that they provide and based on the evaluation then developing a budget that recognizes the costs that they encounter on a day-to-day basis because of the services that they provide. I feel really strongly that I know that the department has done some work in this area, but it is an area where, as a government and as a Department of Health and Social Services, we have to stop sort of starting to do something about it and we have to absolutely do something about it. We need to revise how we budget for these two authorities in particular.
Lastly, this particular supplementary appropriation, the net ask, the net amount of money that we are going to be asked to approve is about $8.2 million. It’s more than that in terms of the total amount of money, and when you add up all the bits and pieces – some of it we are getting from the federal government, some of it is transfers between departments – I’m concerned and it goes to my general feeling that we’re not budgeting properly. After Supplementary Appropriation No. 2, which was done in the last Assembly… I’ll back up. We normally have a reserve fund and at the beginning of the budget year. We say we’re going to place I think it was $15 million aside and we are going to use that as required throughout the budget year when there are cost overruns. After Supplementary Appropriation No. 2, we were in the hole $3.1 million in the reserve, so we spent all of our $10 million or $15 million that was in the reserve and we had gone over by about $3 million.
So we’re now adding another $8.2 million to our reserve fund. So we’re going to be in the hole over $11 million. It almost begs the question why have the reserve, why do we not just leave it at zero because the reserve number really doesn’t mean anything. We spend our reserve funds of $10 million or $15 million and we just carry on and ask for more money and ask for more money.
So, again, I have to question a lot of the expenditures that are in here. If we are constantly allowing departments to overspend, do we really know what we’re spending our money on and are we really getting the programs and services that we think we need. It’s very difficult at the beginning of a budget to say this is what we’re going to spend our money on, but when we get to zero and we have none left, well, we just go and ask for more. So how can we truly evaluate whether or not we’re efficiently and effectively spending our money?
I’ll have specific questions when we get to various departments, but that’s it for now. Thanks, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister Miltenberger.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I live and work for the day as Finance Minister where we’ll have a session in this House and Ms. Bisaro will say we’ve done a good job on budgeting and that we hit an acceptable range of budgets so that we’ll know that we’ve almost approached as close to perfection probably as we’ll ever get. But in the meantime, what we have here are legitimate requests. The Legislature of course can say no. That is our legal right, but we believe we’ve demonstrated very clearly the need.
I think all the Members that have been through the facilities, and we’ve all been through facilities, would acknowledge that the things we do and the work that we do in health and education and housing and every department that’s asking for money are legitimate. We’re paying for what we get. In fact, we all have stood in this House and in committee meetings, we’ve all heard in our constituencies that there’s need for money, more resources, more programs and we try to manage that. Yes, we set targets for ourselves and we try to meet those, but we also are realistic and come back when we know there are things that have to be funded, in our opinion.
So I appreciate the Member’s comments and hopefully over the next three budget years I’m sure we’ll continue to work on the challenge of coming up with a system that meets the needs of all the Members of the Legislative Assembly. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. General comments. Next I have Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d just like to add my voice to my colleague’s, Ms. Bisaro. I don’t see these as legitimate if they reflect bad management of the resources that we’ve had for the year. Can I just get confirmed, Madam Chair, what was our reserve? We reviewed it and established it in the 16th Assembly. Did we establish it at $10 million, or would the Minister know if it was $15 million? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Mr. Miltenberger.
Madam Chair, it’s $10 million. Thank you.
So this negative $11.3 million, that tells me that we’ve more than doubled that, is that correct? Are we now at $22.3 million into supplementary funding? Is that correct?
Yes, Madam Chair.
I just wanted to establish those numbers to be sure. That is a flag. We did review this quite thoroughly in the 16th Assembly and we came up with the $10 million very much explicitly and on purpose. My colleagues have already raised many points. Mr. Yakeleya has raised many points and others. I think we’ll hear similar comments as we go department to department. Typically they reflect a lack of action on prevention sides and cutting to the chase on a lot of these issues or improper funding to begin with.
So sticking with general comments there, I think I’ll leave it at that. We need to do better. I don’t agree with the Minister that, yes, this is just a regular part of doing business. To some degree it is and that is why we established a $10 million reserve. So do we tell our departments that anything over that comes out of your existing? You know, what are your priorities? What are you going to give up without sacrificing services or what? But that’s why we’re paying top dollar to our managers and I think we should be able to expect that sort of level of performance. I’ll leave it at that.
I appreciate the Member’s comments. There is constant pressure on government to do more and constant pressure in this Assembly, constant pressure from our constituents. I mean, I’ve heard it around the table: let’s add money to pave roads, let’s add money for compassionate travel, let’s add money, let’s build more, let’s do things. We have to make choices and this Legislature has the authority. If they say that we’re not going to spend this money and we’re not going to pay for it, I mean, that’s our choice. We’re saying and we’re making the case here that these are very critical programs and I don’t think it’s bad management. I think there are cost pressures in our system that have to be met. We are attempting to do that. I appreciate the Member’s comments and look forward to the detail. Thank you.
Thanks to the Minister for that response. I don’t disagree with him. There are cases when we need to respond, but there are quite a number of cases, as we’ve heard from the comments and as we will hear as we go through this, where I think we could have done a better job and we need to start doing a better job. It’s very tough. We’re talking services now. It’s very tough to say no at this point in time when the damage has been done. So that sort of behaviour and allowance perpetuates itself. That’s what I’m talking about.
There are a number of items where I think we could probably find general agreement that we should be doing a better job, but I do accept the points the Minister has made as well. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister Miltenberger.
No, no comment there. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Next on the list I have again Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to I guess restate that the funding that we get here, certainly it’s known from us that there are pressures, there are costs every time you come to a budget. The unforeseeable ones, a good example is the forest fires. We don’t know. We budget a certain amount and we either go over or under.
I have to support the comments from Ms. Bisaro. If we’re not funding the health and social services, Stanton, the Beaufort-Delta, then we need to fund them properly. This is nuts here. Coming back in for another $3 million, come back next time for another $3 million. This is not good. We have to do that, but there’s a business plan process where we add our list to the government to ask for what we want in our communities. This is operational money. This is not infrastructure. This is operational money that goes to provide services to our hospitals and our health care. People expect that.
Mr. Lafferty talked about the downturn in the mining sector. We knew that was coming. People need to get support from the government. Contractors are laying off people. We’ve given out close to a million dollars in income support. The mining sector said they’re doing good and everything for the Northwest Territories, yet they’re laying off a lot of people. What is the mining sector telling us? The government is left holding the bag.
For the $1.7 million for utility costs for NWT Housing Corporation, my goodness, what numbers are they using? They have to come to us and say we need another $1.7 million for utility costs. Something’s not right here. They have to know the utility costs in our small communities. They should be right up to date. They have housing managers, they have district managers. They have to do their jobs.
The Canadian Blood Services also get blood from donators. Why are we spending close to $3 million? I guess Mr. Bromley brought up some good comments. Twenty-two million dollars. Are we not telling the departments to bring your numbers up to a realistic figure? Are they so used to, so ingrained in their attitude that we’ll just get a supplement from the government? We’ll make them feel bad, so we have to support them. This affects our people in our communities. Is that a cultural attitude within the government for getting this up?
Look, we’re at $22 million. Someone’s not doing their job. That’s what I’m seeing. We’ll go through it and probably approve everything. Rest assured they will come back again with another supp, different day, different story, but really we need to have a good talk about we’re going to fund Stanton properly and Beaufort-Delta properly. Let’s do a proper job on it. Let’s do a good job. Give them the money if they need it. Or the Hay River or Fort Smith, those boards. Just give them the good money. Do a good job.
The Minister talks about other needs in the community. We’ve been asking that for a long, long time. It takes a long time to get. I guess that’s my sense of the supp. Like I said, if we were a private business we would be broke. We would be out of business. Taxpayers are paying for this no matter what.
So go through the motions. Go through the supp. You know what? It’s going to get approved. What are we approving, that it’s okay to have these kinds of numbers come before us again? These are operational numbers. I can understand the medevacs. It’s important. We pick up the cost. I’m from the Sahtu; we don’t have an all-weather road. Medevacs are very important to my people’s lives. I understand the high cost of it.
I think I’ll leave the rest for details. These are just my general comments thinking about what’s before us right now.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Any response, Mr. Miltenberger?
Thank you, Madam Chair. Just quickly, we’ve had this discussion before and there are two basic approaches that I’ve lived through in government. In the old days your current year budget was always based on how much you spent the previous year. Government would spend all their money and at year end they would drive up their budgets and get funding starting that year based on that figure. It was an unsustainable pattern of constant, uncontrollable growth. The Legislature said this is not the way to do business, we cannot control government expenditures, we do not have enough say. So we’re going to set these tough, lean budgets and if they want more money, they’re going to have to come back and justify it to the Legislature as a way to make sure that there was debate and control, and that we had that kind of say over how the taxpayers’ dollars are being spent. Now there’s from some Members a push to just go back and whatever they spend, we’ll give it to them and if they spend more, we’ll just keep adding it to the budget. We don’t have the oversight. We won’t have it here except once here, when we do the main estimates. That is an important discussion because our cost to government is not getting any cheaper. What is the most appropriate way to get checks and balances as we go forward? What involvement does this Legislature want? Once a year at main estimates and you hope the numbers are right or you come back and justify.
I believe the Minister of Health would like to make a comment, if that’s okay.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member is talking about the need to reform the governance. Without reforming our governance and operating great parts of health and social services as one system could go a long way to resolving the solution. We have looked at our audit and in the Auditor General’s report they talk about a lot of the cost pressures and how the various authorities do the same programs, the same programs that we deliver to those in a different way. There is savings to be had in the area of putting one system together under procurement. Also in the various aspects of finance where a lot of the back office stuff that is driving the costs at Stanton, for example, may not have to be necessarily housed in the hospital. Where it comes at a premium cost of anything housed in a hospital, because of the nature of how we have to keep the hospitals and have the sick people in there as well. Some of those things are something we’re looking at as a department, and when I referred to having discussions with the various Joint Leadership members from across the various health authorities, we talked about that, on how we could balance out the costs and even reduce costs by reforming the governance at this time.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Next on my list I have Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to pick up on where some of the comments from my previous colleagues were touching base on. I have to concur that, and I’m sure the Minister and his team and the Ministers on the floor are aware that some of us back here as Regular Members are business owners or have been business owners for many years. Although this is probably my first supplemental appropriation in terms of an ask, I don’t think we’re a stranger or I’m a stranger in terms of the markings of what I see here as something very unique. It’s something you don’t see in business, the type of operation that if this was a business, as the Member for Sahtu indicated, you would be bankrupt.
The thing is I’m hearing from the Minister lean and control and doing so in a way to come back to make sure we spend the right money, but the reality is, this repeats itself time and time again. This is not the first time. I’ve gone back and looked at the history of some of the appropriation asks and a lot of numbers repeat themselves almost to the penny or percentage of the budget. The time and energy that’s taken out of House business to do this year after year after year in terms of preparation for this, I just can’t imagine how much time and energy it is just to get it to the floor here for discussion. It would be mindboggling.
In the world of business we work with mostly a zero-based budget, which really is you work in terms of real dollars, what it’s going to cost you at the end of the day. As mentioned, we’re over $22 million already into supplementary for the year. We’re not talking a small amount of money here; we’re talking a large amount of money. I tend to disagree that this is a lean and mean approach to doing prudent investments for the people of the Northwest Territories. I think it’s far from it. I think it’s a bit of a cloak and dagger, so to speak, where we’re pretending that we’re lean and mean where really we’ve got an endless pot of money that we can come back to time and time again. I think this is not the type of business that I should be supporting as a Member or the people at large.
That said, I’ll have some details for sure, but just from the general comments point of view, when we look at – as the Members for Sahtu and Frame Lake indicated – the Department of Health and Social Services for Stanton and the Beaufort-Delta, if this was a one-time-only I wouldn’t speak about this, but this is a repeated event that happens almost yearly. You can almost set your clock to this. I’m thinking where are we going wrong as government in not making those predictions, or where are we not spending the money properly, or where are we not investing properly.
What makes me even more concerned, and being a health care professional myself, when I hear comments such as this amount will be fully offset by accumulated operating surpluses in other health and social services authorities, which makes me beg to believe that programs may have suffered. That has been quantified. The Auditor General last year in her report clearly identified lack of programs in the areas of diabetes. I’m sure the Member for Sahtu will agree. He brings up diabetes all the time, how the programs weren’t offered. Here we’re basically telling the people of the Northwest Territories we’ll find the money because we didn’t offer all the programs. It’s been documented. I’m not making this up. This has been right from the Auditor General’s report and it’s a tabled document in this House.
With that first question, with this type of mindset, to the Minister, should we be concerned that this is a culture that we keep going and saying we’ll find the money elsewhere at the sacrifice of the programs?
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Madam Chair. On a comparative basis if you look across the country, let’s pick one of my favourite provinces just given her size and the magnitude and complexity of the problems they’re dealing with, they’re spending over 45 cents on every dollar on health alone. In this jurisdiction we’re spending about 34 cents of every dollar on health and social services. If you tack on health or tack on all the other social programs, we are spending over 65 cents on every dollar. The growth in social programs is a concern because it limits our ability, but on a comparative basis I would say we are managing ourselves. Maybe not as well as the Member would indicate or see.
One of the challenges we have, of course, as a government is, yes, we can raise taxes, but over the last number of years we’ve chosen not to just because of the economic conditions. Businesses raise prices. They raise taxes. Drugs are one of our biggest costs and it rises and goes right through the roof. Those are costs that we have no choice on. Business can drive their revenues in a way that we can’t. I think we should keep that in mind as well.
This is a good discussion to have about are we doing things right, are we right-sized, are we managing ourselves correctly. I look forward to the discussion, because we’ve been having it for a number of years. This is more than a rubber-stamp, as the Member said. This will be approved because they make sense, and when we stand up and say are we going to cut these programs to our constituents or do we find the money to fund them, we’ve been saying find the money to fund them.
We’re managing ourselves. We’re one of the best run jurisdictions in the country, second probably only to Alberta and possibly the Yukon, in our debt-to-GDP and any other number of indicators, as we’ve demonstrated to you. It’s not like we’re profligate spendthrifts or blowing money like drunken sailors. These are incredibly important initiatives. We struggle trying to meet all these needs and we say no a tremendous amount of the time as well. It is a challenge, Madam Chair, and I appreciate the feedback from the Members as we try to improve how we do this. Thank you.
I’m appreciative that we’re not drunken sailors and it’s a sobering thought that we’re not.
Again, I don’t want to get into a statistical rampage with the Minister here. Again, I mean, stats-wise they say 42 cents of every tax dollar in Canada is being spent in health, and it’s clear that the NWT is spending well under that. The Minister says 34 cents. I believe that number is relatively lower. If we factor some of the pertinence of real health care, I think the number is probably closer to 27 percent. That said, I’ll have more questions with respect to details in the Health area.
One of the other areas I want to bring up is obviously recurring costs that we see. If you look at from last year’s supplementary to this year’s supplementary, when it comes down to the NWT Housing Corporation, in the opening comments of the Minister, $1.739 million is being mentioned here in the opening comments. This is a sobering number that almost mirrors what we saw last year around the same time of a similar nature. Again, going back to forced growth or making good predictions in budgetary terms, how can numbers like this keep repeating themselves time and time again? Why aren’t they part of the regular budgeting process? Thank you.
The main extenuating circumstance with the Housing Corporation, of course, is the significant diminishment of funding from CMHC. They made a determination a number of years ago now that they’re getting out of funding O and M costs for public and social housing, and they’re doing that. The latest, I think, cut was over $900,000. We’re not shutting the houses down, so we carry the cost as long as we can. The Housing Corporation has been asked to fund that from within, but there comes a point where it’s not sustainable. We can’t afford to do that.
The other thing is when you look at our utilities, it’s assumed that the Housing Corporation gets the same rate as ordinary homeowners when, in fact, the Housing Corporation pays a full government rate on all the utilities, and in many communities – and we’ve had this discussion before – it’s a cost-plus program. When you’re driving community services, because there’s a subsidized rate for the residents, if you need more money in that program area, you raise the cost, because the Housing Corporation and the government pay the full rate yet your own citizens will be protected.
There are some very clear extenuating circumstances when it comes to housing. I’m not sure whether Minister McLeod wanted to add more to that or not.
Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Minister McLeod.
Thank you, Madam Chair. Minister Miltenberger explained it very well. CMHC declining funding is probably one of the biggest drivers. Another one is the fact that we don’t collect enough revenue from our tenants. If we collected the amount of revenue that was due to Housing, then we wouldn’t have to keep coming back for the $1.7 million. Housing normally has been very good at funding it from within, but with the declining funding, again, it’s getting more and more difficult to try and find this money. We’ve actually had to bail out a particular LHO because they were unable to pay their utility bill at their local hamlet office because they weren’t generating enough revenue.
These are challenges we face and we’re looking, as part of the Shelter Policy review, at the idea of raising what we charge tenants for utilities. We’re faced with challenges there again. We’ve got 768 seniors that pay no rent, but yet those units have to be maintained. If we collected even a minimum amount of rent for those 768 units, that might help offset this again.
We have challenges all around, as the Minister said. We try not to pass these on to the residents as much as we can. That’s why we end up having to eat a lot of these costs. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister McLeod. Next on the list I have Mr. Moses.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d just like to reiterate comments made by our fellow Members here at the table in regard to the contribution funding to the department of the Beaufort-Delta Health and Social Services Authority.
I did attend their AGM this past spring, or this winter here, and they did mention that it is something that’s recurring. As much as we have pressures and stresses put on Members and this government to look for funding and try to find funding to offset the deficit that this department goes through and these authorities go through, we also have to look at that we don’t only represent the patients, the clients, the people that are being affected by this, but we’re also representing the staff in these authorities who are given these pressures and stressors to try to find money to cut from their departments and find ways to offset this deficit.
I think we know what’s wrong and it’s something that’s been discussed. At our last Beaufort-Delta leadership meeting our Minister of Health and Social Services heard it. He heard it from not only our leaders in Inuvik, but he heard it from our leaders in Tsiigehtchic, Aklavik, Fort McPherson; you know, the communities on the coast. I think our next plan of action is to take those suggestions and put them into place, looking at our physicians. There’s a lot of money that goes into all the locums that go up there that do contribute to the deficit as well as the board structure. We need better input from our community leaders rather than decisions made in this House. The people that are there in the front lines and working in that authority, the ones that are getting stressed out because of the financial drawbacks that they are facing. It does become a money issue, but we also have to make sure that we’re not exhausting our staff and putting undue pressure on them, so that they can go out and do their jobs and provide the services that are needed. As the Minister stated, it does provide acute care services in that region and outside of Yellowknife it does provide a lot to not only the Beaufort-Delta region but also to the Sahtu. I mean, there are a lot more people in the territory that go through that authority rather than just the Beaufort-Delta, and that needs to be looked at as well.
It is a deficit that we’ve seen for the past few years, and as much as the deficit does affect the programs, it also has a strong effect on the staff there. I know that the Minister did get a lot of recommendations from our last Beaufort-Delta leadership meeting and I think those need to be addressed with this government so that next year we’re not looking at those. Or that we make the appropriate budget item changes in the new fiscal year so that we’re not looking at this again, and that other authorities who are in surpluses can use those monies for their programs, and that we’re looking at the patterns that the Beaufort-Delta authority is going through and adjust those while we can.
I think there’s some good discussion around here today, and I think we all know that the next steps are to find solutions to those, not only in this House but with our leaders in the communities. Thank you.
Minister Miltenberger, did you wish to comment?
No, Madam Chair. I just appreciate the Member’s comments.
Thank you to the Minister. Mrs. Groenewegen.
Thank you, Madam Chair. Sitting here listening to the general comments of my colleagues, there are issues with the way we spend money. I hear what the Minister is saying, that if we over-budget, then everybody will just make sure they live up to that expectation and spend that much money. If we under-budget, then we have an exercise like we have here today, where we have to come back and ask for additional money and it has to be rationalized. It has to go through Cabinet. It has to go through the FMB process, et cetera. However, I have not yet seen or heard of a good explanation for why the Deh Cho and Hay River health authorities are operating with such surpluses and why the Inuvik and Stanton ones are operating in such deficits. We just hear things that are vague like, oh, those other two are acute care facilities. I want something more substantial than that. That is just kind of a, yeah, that is a given. Those two health authorities are incurring costs associated with acute care, but we need a little bit more in-depth analysis than that because it doesn’t feel or look right. It doesn’t look and feel right to me when the Hay River Health Authority has to give up its surplus to the Stanton Territorial Health Authority when we haven’t got $20,000 to operate a handivan in Hay River. We haven’t got enough money for a women’s shelter but we are giving back millions in surplus from our operations at our local health authority. That doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t look right. I have never really had an adequate explanation of why that is, but I sit on the Social Programs so I will be continuing to press on that.
…(inaudible)…dollar values that are listed on this sheet. They are high. The Minister says we don’t spend money like drunken sailors. When Mr. Dolynny was agreeing with him, I was saying yes, we do. It has been so long since we have gone to a zero-based look at how we spend our money, we just vigorously guard the status quo. If it is something we already spend money on, we want to keep spending money on it. How often do we sit and look at how much money we spend and what do we get for the money we spend? How much effort do we put into that exercise? Honestly, with all due respect to the folks in the bureaucracy, what incentive do they have to figure out ways to do things differently or more cost effectively? After all, whose money is it? It is really none of our money. None of us are really close enough to the expenditures that we feel like we’re opening our wallets and putting the money out there. Where we feel it is when we have a voice in this House to bring forward the aspirations of our constituents and our communities and we are constantly told no we can’t do that because we have to keep doing things the same old way.
What incentive is there for folks that are on the front line or in the bureaucracy to figure out a way of doing things more cost effectively in a money saving kind of a way? There is none. Can we implement a program where we reward people generously in the public service that come up with a smarter, more effective, efficient way of doing something? I mean, like a big reward. I mean an incentive kind of reward. It’s not their job right now. We don’t actually work at that level so it’s hard for us to sit in some ways on the outside looking in and saying this is how it should be done, but I do have a sense that we do guard doing things the way we always did them. We never take an objective step back from that and say okay, the budget of this government is an enormous amount of money for the people we have here in the territory and for what we have to undertake. Is there something else or a different way we like to spend that so it could encompass more of the things we would like to do?
The other problem with doing that or looking at doing things more cost effectively, and I looked at things on this paper, on this supplementary appropriation, like the 49 residents of ours that are in care, 49 clients for $5.3 million. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that we could not take care of those NWT residents in the Northwest Territories and keep that $5.3 million, actually do it better than they can do it anywhere in southern Canada for $5.3 million a year. We don’t spend any time or effort analyzing that idea. We just keep writing the cheques, sending them to Alberta. When do we stop ourselves and say look, how can we do a better job? I just don’t get a sense there is a lot of that.
The other problem with doing that on some activities is that the largess of this government is kind of what makes this territory go around. Do we spend too much money on medical travel? Well, there is all the economy that is created with that activity. People fly. I don’t think there are just a few people that are benefitting from that; a lot of the activities of this government have the spin-off effect of creating a lot of economy that keeps turning over and over here in the North.
Again, there is not a lot of incentive for looking at the largess of government and figuring out a way to do things more efficiently or more cost effectively, because as soon as we do that, then I guess we are taking the money out of somebody’s hands. We employ somebody who… It just keeps turning over and over. So it all comes down to priorities. What are our priorities and can we afford our priorities within the current structure of how we do things?
I guess I am still an idealist. I am still optimistic that we can do things better and that we wouldn’t be seeing these kinds of numbers coming back here. It takes analysis and hard work and I will leave it at that. Thank you, Madam Chair.
