Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to express pretty much the same comments that were expressed earlier by Mr. Abernethy and Mr. Ramsay. I, too, have had great difficulty with the size of this supp as it has come forward. It was my expectation that with departments having a certain amount of money to sort of deal with on their own that it might reduce the amount of the supplementary appropriations that have come forward and it has not. So I’m a little disappointed in that.
I think philosophically that giving money to the departments up front, giving the $15 million out is a good idea. I think we should continue to do that, but there has to be some change somewhere in either the mentality of departments or in the mentality of us here, similar to what Mr. Ramsay said. Maybe we have to say no once or twice to get people to wake up and recognize that no, you can’t always be asking for money and always get it.
With regards to HR and the two expenditures on this page, at the risk of being repetitive, I feel very much as Mr. Abernethy does and I’m really pleased to hear from Minister McLeod that they’re going to start asking for funding on an annual basis to fund negotiations. It’s my feeling that we ought to be able to at least approximate a certain amount of money that’s going to be required for negotiations in any year when we are doing contract negotiations. If it varies by $100,000 one way or the other, well, that’s to be expected, but we should at least be putting an amount into the budget to indicate that, yes, we are expecting to negotiate, and probably doing it over multi years is better than doing it at any one year in that it may, unlikely, but it may confuse the union as to what kind of money they are maybe going to be able to work with.
So I can accept these expenditures, but I don’t like it. I recognize that there are costs that we have to bear, but I would think that we need to plan better in the future. That’s all. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Not wanting to chew anybody’s cabbage twice, I’ll just thank the Member for her comments and indicate once again that we’re interested to look at making this system as effective as possible for all of us, and that my own sense is, being around a while, is that these costs are going to be incurred, it’s just a matter of how we account for them, how accurately we can do it and how far ahead we can. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Committee, we’re on page 7, Executive, operations expenditures, Human Resources, directorate, not previously authorized, $526,000. Agreed?
Agreed.
Human Resources, $526,000.
Agreed.
Page 8, Executive, operations expenditures, Financial Management Board Secretariat, government accounting, not previously authorized, $1.219 million. Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess I just have to express my dismay at the amount of money that we’re spending on the Territorial Power Subsidy Program. I know our power rates are high, but it’s a huge amount of money that we’re giving away. This supp is for $1.2 million and when I look at the reserve that was allocated to FMB, another $225,000 went into the Territorial Power Subsidy Program. So it’s like $1.5 million over and above what we budgeted that’s going in there. So I don’t really have a question. Again, I think this is more a comment against this particular program, which we have to change somehow, somewhere. I don’t have a solution, unfortunately. So thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Any comments, Minister Miltenberger?
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think there’s a fundamental agreement that subsidies in the long term are not sustainable and not the goal of any operation like ours. But the reality is until we can make the cost of power affordable in the communities, we’ve embarked on the Territorial Power Support Program and in fact we also have $9 million in for a commercial subsidy to try to lower the cost of power and hopefully the food basket in communities. It is a cost, but for all of us that are on hydro, it’s something that we take for granted. The other thing that people on hydro never have to worry about is they never have to worry about 700 kilowatts, but all the other people in the small communities do. So this is an issue we have to be very careful of. We’ve made a commitment as a Territory and a government of the value of the regions and communities, and this is one of the costs that goes with it. But this is why we put $60 million into alternative energy to try to bring some of those costs under control. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Ms. Bisaro.
No, that’s all. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I agree with the Minister.
Thank you for that comment. Committee, once again, we’re on page 8, Executive, operations expenditures, Financial Management Board Secretariat, government accounting, not previously authorized, $1.219 million. Agreed?
Agreed.
Total Financial Management Board Secretariat, $1.219 million.
Agreed.
Total department, $1.908 million.
Agreed.
Page 9, Public Works and Services, operations expenditures, asset management, not previously authorized, $640,000.
Agreed.
Total department, $640,000.
Agreed.
Page 10, Health and Social Services, operations expenditures, health services programs, not previously authorized, $8.033 million. Agreed?
Agreed.
Supplementary health programs, $1.2 million. Agreed?
Agreed.
Community health programs, $1.6 million. Agreed?
Agreed.
Total department, $10.833 million. Mr. Krutko.
Out of the $10.8 million, how much of that is for the Inuvik Health Board?
Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We don’t have that number, though we do have the number of deficits, but I don’t have that specific number out of the $10 million.
Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Does the Minister of Health…Sorry. Minister Miltenberger.
Mr. Chairman, if we are looking at the total $10 million, I looked on the list. There is nothing specifically earmarked for funding to health boards except the mammography in Hay River. The rest of the costs are for physician services in the Northwest Territories or outside of the Northwest Territories. There is supp health or children in care. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As much as I am somewhat flabbergasted by the amount of money that we have to approve here, I can see that these costs are ones that we don’t have a heck of a lot of control over. I am somewhat concerned when I look at the information we were given on the utilization of the supplementary reserve. Of the over $6 million that the Health department got in their supplementary reserve fund, $2.3 million went to Stanton Hospital and $2.3 million went to the Beaufort-Delta Health and Social Services Authority as one-time funding. That concerns me. That is a pretty healthy amount of money. By giving these lump sum payments to these two authorities, it means that there was some $5 million which wasn’t available to the department to kind of offset some of the costs that we are being asked to approve in this supplementary appropriation. It is a bit of a shell game, I think. I am concerned about the huge costs that we have to bear with Health and Social Services. I doubt the Finance Minister has an explanation, but I would love to hear one if he has it. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister Miltenberger.
Mr. Chairman, those two figures were money that was put towards both the Stanton and to Inuvik Health and Social Services Authority as an offset to help them cover some of their costs and mitigation measures that they weren’t able to implement. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Ms. Bisaro. We are moving on to Mr. Abernethy.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In my opening comments I talked about areas we should have been able to predict that there would be some costs. I know it would be difficult, but I think that in the areas of providing funding for services incurred outside of the Northwest Territories, that $5.1 million, also the increased costs resulting of the finalization of the new physician contract, the $1.2 million for supp health, the increased costs associated with requirements for children residing in residential care outside the Territories, those are things that I mean, the physician negotiations we know are coming. Granted, we don’t know what the results are going to be, but it is an area that if we do forecasting and some projections we should be able to come up with some idea of...Even if we are low, it is better than coming forward with the full amount later, in my opinion.
You are asking for recommendations from us. Do some forecasting. Do some projections. Try and get as close as you reasonably can, knowing that in both, all four of these areas, it is probably impossible to get a bang-on totally accurate total, but put money in the budget instead of coming back for a supp.
The supp you are asking for here, $10.8 million for Health? That is bigger than our whole supp reserve fund. That one department just took the whole reserve fund right there. It is gone. I think there should be some expectation on the departments to do some forecasting, modelling and projections on the areas of known expense in every one of these four. I would find it unbelievable if the department totally had no clue that these things would be coming. This is more of a comment. I think we should do some more forecasting.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Minister Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There are a number of points for discussion here. I believe one of the issues with collective bargaining is -- and we have had this discussion before -- if we put the money in the budget when we are going to negotiations, it tends to be a giveaway as was the concern with capital projects, which is why, when we put out the information, we don’t have the dollar figure in, so that it is not…People don’t know exactly the amount in the budget and they tailor their bids to the amount.
The other issue is, yes, the departments have estimates, but the practice has been in these areas, come back when you spent the money and you will know what you exactly need. If we want to build in estimates, we have to have that discussion and our best guess is that there has just been a reluctance to do that especially for Health which tends to come back on a fairly regular basis for funding. Thank you.
Thanks to the Minister for that. I get that especially around the Collective Agreement and bargaining stuff. In that argument itself, in my opinion, it suggests that we didn’t get it right the first time when we reduced the supplementary reserve to $10 million. If we know that Health, as an example, is going to come back with these things on a regular basis, to suggest that $10 million is ever going to be enough isn’t realistic. So either we have to put more money back into the supp under the understanding that these types of things are going to happen on a regular basis or we have to find a new way of doing things so that this forecasting and modelling can be done and built in somewhere so it doesn’t pop into the supps. Ten point eight million dollars for Health. That is more than our entire supp amount was. Something has to be done here, otherwise we are just going to keep coming back and blowing that $10 million every year. I would like us to actually hit some target that we have actually set for ourselves. That would be amazing and awesome. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
We will look forward to having that discussion early in the spring here as we sort out going forward into 2010-11. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Is there anything further? We are moving on to the bottom of page 10, total department, $10.833 million.
Agreed.
Page 11, Education, Culture and Employment, operations expenditures, education and culture, not previously authorized, $3 million.
Agreed.
Total department, not previously authorized, $3 million.
