Thank you. My questions today are addressed to the Minister of Finance, and I would like to thank him again for the opportunity to tell him what he should be doing.
I’d like to ask a question of the Minister relative to the changes to this year’s plan and the opportunity or the possibility of an evaluation. I’d like to know if the Minister can advise the House, and me in particular, of any plans he has to evaluate this new budget process.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. The honourable Minister of Finance, Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, as well, always appreciate an opportunity when the Member has to tell me what to do. I appreciate her advice.
In this case we are very much on the same page. We’ve already had discussions with staff that we want to do a debrief about how the process works. We’d like to come and sit down with committee, as well, to get feedback so that we can, as we look to the cycle next year, address a lot of the issues that may come up. A lot of them may be issues related to process or content.
We are very much interested in trying to learn from this first run through, now that it’s been field tested. I believe there are opportunities for improvement.
I thank the Minister for his comments. It’s always wonderful when both sides of the House are on the same page.
I mentioned in my statement that Members on this side of the House have indicated a concern with equal sharing of dollars and so on. There has also been expressed over the last several months a need for Members to have input into the Capital Plan, a need for Members to get a project on the list. I’d like to ask the Minister what he intends to do to enable Members to get a project on the list. We need a new process, because the current one isn’t working.
Mr. Speaker, firstly, I would differ somewhat from the Member’s characterization that the system is not working. It’s working, and I think that for the most part it works well. In some cases it may not be working as well as we would like, but I think overall…. We’ve been evolving this process for many, many decades now.
We have come up with what we think are the latest improvements, where we will commit to providing a ten year retrospective for Members. We’ll look at the 20-year plan going forward. We’re going to get feedback, we hope, from committee in terms of the process and steps that are currently there. We already have a significant number of steps and processes that have been put in place to ensure, to the best of our ability, fairness and equity. It’s still an issue that has not been satisfactorily addressed. Collectively, I believe that we can go forward to make improvements to this system that is working but that we want to make work better.
The Minister mentioned a number of actions that are currently in place to try and determine an equitable distribution of dollars and projects. Again, I say there is certainly a perception that that is not operating as efficiently as it should, or certainly it’s not to the satisfaction of Members on this side of the House.
I guess I would like to know from the Minister what actions or what things are currently in place. What do they currently do when they are looking at projects? What do they do to try and ensure that it’s a fair distribution?
We work with a committee of deputies. We work with the Cabinet. We work with committees to review the plans. We’re committed to reviewing and updating the 20 year plan. We started a new process this year. We have an infrastructure committee that’s at work on improvements to the capital planning process.
This new staging of the process in the fall, for example, is one of those significant improvements that we brought forward collectively. We’re going to look to what other advice the infrastructure committee brings forward and, as well, whatever input the committee and Regular Members would provide from Priorities and Planning.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Final supplementary, Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thanks again to the Minister. I guess I would like to suggest that perhaps his perception of how fair things are is not the same as what’s over here and not the same as my own. If there is a per capita cost to the projects within individual communities, it certainly isn’t even. I would like to suggest that there needs to be a better opportunity for Members to feel that the distribution is even.
I’d like to ask the Minister, as a last question.... I understand that individual years certainly can vary from one year to the next or that amounts can vary per community from one year to the next, but does the department ever consider a five year average, for instance, on a per capita basis for projects?
We provided the Members information over a four year period both by constituency and by community to give Members a sense of the money that was spent. We managed to get the housing dollars as well as the money contributed by MACA, which makes for a significant amount of money that we are spreading across the North.
We want to be very careful as we look at per capita. It’s one of the issues we always take exception to when we deal with the federal government when they want to allocate the money that they have on a per capita basis, because invariably, because of the small size of our population, we get a very small amount of money. We have been arguing for years for a base plus approach to funding arrangements. It’s the same approach that MACA used or is using when they allocate money to the communities. They’ve agreed to a formula where there is a base, I believe, of about $600,000, then plus, based on the size of your population, which recognizes that there are larger communities.
So there are ways for us to look at how capital is allocated. But I can tell you from my own experience, per capita, for us, is going to be a process that’s not going to be fair. We know right off the top that Yellowknife and all the large communities would get by far the vast amount of capital.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. The honourable Member for Nunakput, Mr. Jacobson.
