Marsi cho, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I would like to follow up on the responses from the Minister of Finance to the honourable Member from Kam Lake's questions on small businesses. The Minister indicated that a 1 per cent cut would cost the government about $750,000 in revenue. I would like to ask the Minister if he would consider another method of putting the $750,000 directly into small businesses in the NWT. Thank you.
Masi. Minister of Finance.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I will not commit to actually putting that $750,000 into other programs. I did say that, through the programs we offer within the government to support small business, that $750,000 that we would save by not implementing the tax would definitely help to fund some of that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I would like to ask the Minister, along the same line of questioning, if the Minister would do a socio-economic model on what the reduction in, say, social spending would be if the $750,000 was put into small businesses in the communities where there is low employment. The models I have looked at indicate that there could be about 2.5 times the amount of a reduction in social spending on the expenditures. Would the Minister look at doing some sort of socio-economic model on the money that we are referring to pertaining to a 1 per cent reduction in taxes for small business?
The $750,000, I mean, that's what this government would save. That money just stays within the government. It goes to a lot of the full fleet of programs we offer across government-wide. As far as the socio-economic government, I'm not sure what the Member expects to come out of that. I would have to look at that and see how much work that would actually be. I can say that, with the small communities, it was the small community employment fund that was recently approved, $4.2 million. We think that would go a long way into helping with the employment in the small communities. I'd have to confirm but I'm not sure how many businesses would be affected by this reduction if it were to go ahead. Again, I mean we are still open. We still have two years left in our mandate. We will still continue to do the work and if we feel that there is something that we need to implement, then we will look at it.
Oral questions. Member for Mackenzie Delta.
