Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I believe the committee today would like to deal with Tabled Document 75–16(2), Supplementary Appropriation No. 2, 2008–2009. Time permitting, we would like to deal with the Premier’s sessional statement. But first we would like to do the supp. Thank you.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. Does the committee agree?
Agreed.
Okay; we’ll take a break, and we’ll come back to work on Tabled Document 75-16(2).
The Committee of the Whole took a short recess.
All right. We have quorum, so we will reconvene the Committee of the Whole.
Committee, we have agreed to consider Tabled Document 75-16(2), Supplementary Appropriation No. 2, 2008–2009. I would like to now ask the Minister responsible, the Hon. Mr. Miltenberger, to make the opening comment.
Yes, Mr. Chairman. I’m pleased to present Supplementary Appropriation No. 2, 2008–2009. This document outlines the additional appropriation of $11.617 million for operation expenditures and a reduction of $43.329 million for capital investment expenditures in the 2008–2009 fiscal year. Major items for operation expenditures include $3.3 million for the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs to complete upgrades or replace aged water treatment plants in the communities of Deline, Kugluktuk, Tuktoyaktuk, Behchoko and Aklavik. These expenditures will be offset by funding available through the Municipal Rural Infrastructure Fund.
There is $3.1 million for the Department of Education, Culture and Employment for the increased costs associated with the collective agreement between the Government of the Northwest Territories and the Northwest Territories Teachers’ Association and $2.9 million for the Department of Environment and Natural Resources for increased costs due to a severe forest fire scene in 2008.
Major items for capital investment eexpenditures include a reduction of $52 million to reflect the revised cash flow requirements for projects in 2008–2009. The 2009–2010 budgets for these projects will be increased to reflect this change, with $9.4 million to advance projects proposed for 2009–2010 to ensure constructions can be started early and avoid any price escalation to projected costs.
Mr. Chairman, I am prepared to review the details of the supplementary appropriation document.
Thank you, Mr. Minister. Would the Minister like to bring witnesses into the House?
Yes, Mr. Chair.
Does the committee agree?
Agreed.
Thank you, committee. I’ll now ask the Sergeant-at-Arms to escort the witnesses into the Chamber.
Would the Minister please introduce his witnesses.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have with me Ms. Margaret Melhorn, the deputy minister of Finance and FMB, and Mr. Mike Aumond, deputy minister of Public Works and Services. I would also like to request at the appropriate time to bring in Mr. Russ Neudorf, the deputy minister of Transportation, when we get to the Transportation page on the supplementary appropriation.
Thank you. I will now open the floor to general comments on Tabled Document 75-16(2), Supplementary Appropriation No. 2, 2008–2009. Mr. Krutko.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In regard to the $3.3 million to the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs and the upgrades to the water treatment facilities these items have been there for some time. I think the communities are very glad they are there, but they also would like to get some assurance that they will be constructed in a short period of time and put into place. It is a very essential piece of our infrastructure, especially in regard to the water situation in Aklavik.
I would just like to ask the Minister: what are the timelines for these projects, and how soon can the communities expect to see these facilities rolling into our communities so we can start possibly seeing them develop the type of work that has to be done to get ready for them?
Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Minister Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The estimated completion date for Aklavik is March 2010.
Again, we are moving to get these facilities in, but we do have some logistical challenges, as you know. Most of our communities depend on iceroads. I think it is important that we do everything we can to ensure these projects stay on track, that they don’t get derailed and we don’t miss another season. Again, it’s 2010, so I assume that they are going to be coming into Tuk in March.
In the meantime what work is being done to develop the particular site that these facilities will be located on and to also get the sites ready way in advance for these? I understand that these are portable units that will be dropped into place. I am just wondering if those sites will be ready to ensure we are able to have these water treatment plants. I was hoping we could get there sooner than 2010. It has been something that has been through this House several times.
Again, can the Minister commit to me as to what other types of capital expenditures are going to be done on these projects, especially in regard to preparing sites in communities for these treatment plants?
Mr. Chairman, the scope of the work for the project in Aklavik includes planning, design, construction and warranty work associated with replacing existing water treatment systems to meet the Canadian drinking water standards. The existing intakes will be upgraded and reused. The current status is that 60 per cent of the design is scheduled to be received by the end of October 2008, which will be the end of this month.
On another topic: the $2.9 million for Environment and Natural Resources in regard to our fire season. We go through this every year at the end of the fire season. But we are under-estimating the real cost. It seems like there are always these unforeseen costs of forest fire fighting, especially when we have fires that get out of control, especially this year with the fires around Behchoko and also around the Snare hydro site.
I know we would like to see the forest burn in regard to revegetation of those forests, but also we have to be proactive when there is a fire that could be controlled earlier on so it does not get to the point where it’s out of control. We do whatever we have to do to protect those assets, investments, this government has, such as hydro facilities, communities, roads. In the past there has been a lot of discussion around these areas, especially from communities that would like to have been responded to sooner rather than the monitoring of the fire to the point it’s threatening communities or government infrastructure.
I would like to ask the Minister: what is being done to ensure we respond sooner to forest fires so they don’t get out of control? We’re coming every year for a major subsidy, such as almost $3 million again this year. Yet we’re spending in excess of $29 million in this portfolio. I was flying to Inuvik and Yellowknife, and I flew over that fire around the Snare hydro site. You could see from the aircraft it was a small fire that could have been controlled at that point. At the end of the day the hydro facilities were threatened because the fire got away.
I would like to ask the Minister: what are we going to do differently to prevent these types of expenditures coming forward next year in regard to forest fire management?
Mr. Chairman, the initial projected net suppression cost for 2008–2009 was $5.6 million. We ended up with $3 million more than that, with money that was approved.
One of the things we do every fire season is a debriefing on what happened, how it happened, in what areas and what we can learn from that. We’ve also had discussions with the department about looking at the current values at risk system and the command and control structures to make sure we are being as timely as possible and that everything is working as effectively as can be.
I want to point out that we have very capable fire staff. One of the things we always struggle with, of course, is the weather and things that we can’t control. It’s like being in a military campaign. You have to make decisions — you have to make decisions sometimes in a hurry — and you have to move as a result of those decisions. You don’t have often the luxury of hindsight or an extended length of time.
Having said that, we are going to take a look to make sure that if there are improvements, we can be ready for the next fire season.
Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I wanted to ask the Minister and make some comments to item 2 in his opening remarks with regard to the $3.1 million that are costs associated with the collective agreement between the government and the NWTTA — the Northwest Territories Teachers’ Association.
It goes to, I guess, the way we do our budgets and our estimates. I have difficulty in understanding how, when we did our budgets for ’08–09, we didn’t anticipate that there would be some sort of increase for costs associated with this particular agreement between the government and the NWTTA. At that point we would have been in bargaining, I’m sure, and there would have been an expectation that we could make an estimate as to what the results of the bargaining would be.
I guess I have a difficulty where we are asking in a supplementary appropriation to approve an expense that I think ought to have been foreseen and which, in my estimation, ought to have been included in the main budget. My understanding when we passed the ’08–09 budget, not so long ago it seems, was that we were going to be seeing fewer and fewer supplementary appropriations and that they should be basically for unforeseen expenses. I don’t consider this particular item to be an unforeseen expense.
Kind of hand in hand with this particular expense is the effect this particular supplementary appropriation is going to have on our supplementary reserve. Again, it was my understanding that the departments were given a portion of the $25 million supplementary reserve to carry them through expenses that they didn’t necessarily anticipate and to give them bit of leeway in their department budgets. With this particular appropriation it looks to me as though we are going to be left with a supplementary reserve of some $3 million out of approximately $15 million, I think, initially.
I am concerned that a $3 million hit for an NWTTA collective agreement on a supplementary reserve that was already reduced because we were giving funding to the department so they wouldn’t have to come back and ask for more money is not the way we should be going. I would like to perhaps get some comment from the Minister on why we budget this way and if we couldn’t conceivably consider doing it in a different way.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Clearly, this wasn’t an unforeseen expense. It is the way that the money is booked so we can respect the confidentiality as much as possible of the collective bargaining process. We don’t put in our budgets the figures we think are going to be there for negotiation.
It is similar to the issue with the capital plan that Members have raised. There is so much detail in the capital plan that contractors know to the dollar what money is there for a specific contract. So that’s the way the money is booked. Clearly, if there is an interest from the Members in coming up with or looking at alternate ways to book this money, we can have that discussion.
We are also working on looking at other jurisdictions to see how they deal with their particular collective bargaining processes. The good news about this one is that it won’t be before us now for another four years, which should take us into the 17th Assembly.
I thank you, Minister, for the comments. I do appreciate that there is difficulty in being too transparent. I am not advocating that we be quite that transparent. I do think there ought to be methods, and I am glad to hear that the government is looking into other jurisdictions to find out whether there is a method and that we can’t include expected bargaining expenses in our budget so we have a true picture of what it’s actually costing us in any one year. I personally would say to the Minister that, yes, I am fully in support of including this kind of an expense in our yearly budget.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. There’s no question there, so we will move on to the next person. Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to follow up briefly on that one. I assume there will be other labour contracts that we’ll come upon from time to time, employee contracts. It is my understanding that we might have a couple more supplementary appropriations and obviously very little room now. These are issues that were, of course, raised at our first review of the budget. Decisions were made to decrease concerns about decreasing the supplementary reserve.
I would like to ask the Minister: did we in fact make an error? Should we bump it up to be able to recover these costs? Can we expect this to happen regularly, and can we expect that we will be going beyond our supplementary reserves this term?
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The next collective bargaining is going to be in the next number of months with the UNW. I understand they have to go through their convention and election process, and then right after that we’re all gearing up for that round of collective bargaining. If we assume that the length of the agreement will be similar to the one we settled with NWTTA, it would be possibly a four year agreement, which means it wouldn’t come this way again until sometime in the life of the 17th Assembly.
As I’ve indicated to Ms. Bisaro, if there’s a better way to book and account for the money, we’re prepared to have that discussion. We’ll do the cross-jurisdictional survey. We’ll bring that information to the table and, hopefully, have a discussion in the coming weeks about whether we’re going to have any changes to the process.
I assume there are no other remarks from the Minister on the likelihood of overcoming what’s left in the supplementary reserve this fiscal year.
If we overspend the budget, we’ll have to find the money. It will be part of our financial calculations going forward here as we conclude this fiscal year and plan for the next.
Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Are there any further general comments? Mr. Jacobson.
Mr. Chairman, just regarding the upgrades to the water treatment plants in both my communities of Ulukhaktok and Tuktoyaktuk, could the Minister get back to me with a timeline?
Thank you, Mr. Jacobson. Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My recollection is that they’re all scheduled for March 2010.
That is all.
Thank you, Mr. Jacobson. Are there any further general comments? Is the committee agreed there are no further general comments?
Agreed.
Does the committee agree to proceed to detail?
Agreed.
Okay. We’ll now stand down the totals and begin on page 5. Page 5, 2008–2009 Supplementary Appropriation No. 2, Municipal and Community Affairs, Operations Expenditures, Community Operations, Not Previously Authorized: $1 million.
Department of Municipal and Community Affairs, Operations Expenditures, Community Operations, Not Previously Authorized: $1 million, approved.
Regional Operations, Not Previously Authorized: $3.264 million.
Department of Municipal and Community Affairs, Operations Expenditures, Regional Operations, Not Previously Authorized: $3.264 million, approved.
Total Department, Not Previously Authorized: $4.264 million.
Department of Municipal and Community Affairs, Operations Expenditures, Total Department, Not Previously Authorized: $4.264 million, approved.
We’ll move on to page 6, Justice, Operations Expenditures, Legal Aid Services, Not Previously Authorized: $100,000.
Department of Justice, Operations Expenditures, Legal Aid Services, Not Previously Authorized: $100,000, approved.
Community Justice and Corrections, Not Previously Authorized: $654,000.
Department of Justice, Operations Expenditures, Community Justice and Corrections, Not Previously Authorized: $654,000, approved.
Total Department, Not Previously Authorized: $754,000.
Department of Justice, Operations Expenditures, Total Department, Not Previously Authorized: $754,000, approved.
We’ll move along to page 7, Education, Culture and Employment, Operations Expenditures, Advanced Education, Not Previously Authorized: $597,000.
Department of Education, Culture and Employment, Operations Expenditures, Advanced Education, Not Previously Authorized: $597,000, approved.
Education and Culture Not Previously Authorized: $3.052 million.
Department of Education, Culture and Employment, Operations Expenditures, Education and Culture, Not Previously Authorized: $3.052 million, approved.
