Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Hay River South, that Bill 9: Appropriation Act (Operations Expenditures), 2018-2019 be read for the first time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. I had a premonition there. The motion is in order. To the motion.
Question.
Question has been called. The motion is carried.
---Carried
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Yellowknife South, that Bill 9, Appropriation Act (Operations Expenditures), 2018-2019, be read for the second time. Mr. Speaker, this bill authorizes the Government of the Northwest Territories to make appropriations for operation expenditures for the 2018-2019 fiscal year. It also sets out limits on amount that may be borrowed by the Commissioner on behalf of the government, includes information in respect of all existing borrowing and all projected borrowing for the fiscal year, and authorizes the making of disbursements to pay the principal of amounts borrowed. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
To the principle of the bill. Member for Frame Lake.
Merci, Monsieur le President. I wish to speak to the principle of this bill. It was a month ago that I gave my reply to the budget address. What has changed since then in terms of the 2018-2019 budget now that we have an appropriation bill in front of us?
I want to talk a little bit about the budget process. The reductions in this budget are not as drastic as in the previous two fiscal years, but Cabinet continues to cut programs and services to build larger surpluses to spend on infrastructure projects or roads to resources. The promised spending in the last two years of our mandate is limited to a few new initiatives. This was the approach even before the reduced revenues were announced.
In November 2017, Regular MLAs reviewed the departmental business plans. Phase Two reductions appear in many of the departmental budgets. Overall, the business plans often did not contain enough information for us to understand what specific activities were to be undertaken in 2018-2019.
Regular MLAs sent detailed correspondence listing unacceptable reductions and recommended investments and provided supporting rationales for our positions.
The response was that revenues were lower than anticipated and further study was needed by Cabinet. When the full response was received, Cabinet refused to make any of the changes requested by Regular MLAs. Another exchange of letters took place and then Cabinet finally agreed to about $1 million in changes after Regular MLAs began to defer departmental budget consideration in Committee of the Whole. The changes that we asked for were less than one one-thousandth of a percentage of the total budget, at least the changes that we have in the appropriation bill before us and the supplementary appropriations that are to come.
As I said last year, few will ever know how hard the Regular MLAs had to work and work together on behalf of our residents to extract any concessions from Cabinet. Budgets also serve to focus discussions and debate on policy and programs. One lesson that we can take away from this is that responses to commitments made in Committee of the Whole reviews of departmental budgets should be prepared in a more timely fashion.
How can we make the budget process more productive next time around? There needs to be earlier, meaningful consultation with Regular MLAs about the overall fiscal context and direction of the budget, even before the development and reviews of business plans. The review of the business plans was rushed this time because of the change in schedule resulting from a mid-term review and other factors. The business plans themselves need to be significantly improved, and Ministers need to be better prepared. I think we also need to develop a process convention for the budget.
I would like to talk a little bit now about some of the details in the budget. There will be some welcome new investment in the social envelope, including youth mental health and stronger support for FASO and autism. I support these initiatives. There are even some new initiatives related to the environment, including completion of the protected areas network and support for communities dealing with climate change. Unfortunately, these environmental initiatives are funded by internal cuts within Environment and Natural Resources.
On the economic side, I support the increased investment in agriculture, but there is really no serious effort to diversify our economy. Additional funding is being devoted to land rights negotiations, which is welcome, but it comes after two years of cuts in such funding. Little work is under way to develop a knowledge economy and the future of Aurora College is still very much up in the air.
The only new revenue initiative in this budget is the proposal to study a land transfer tax and the continued study of a sugary drink tax that is carried over from the previous year. I cannot accept Cabinet's approach of continual cutting without some corresponding and commensurate effort at raising new revenues. I will repeat my words from my 2017 reply to the budget address: the world, this country, and the NWT have witnessed growing and unparalleled gaps between rich and poor. Our government has done little to address this issue through the tax system.
In my reply to the budget address last month, I said the following:
"The public would be shocked to learn that we will raise more money from tobacco taxes, $16 million, than we get from resource royalties, $13 million. There have been no serious efforts by Cabinet to stabilize and increase our own source revenues. So much for the promise of devolution where our government would do a better job managing resources than the federal government. After almost four years after devolution, not one word of the mirror legislation or regulations has been changed. We can and should be raising significantly more from mining, as shown by two independent experts who have recently examined our revenues from this sector. A review of mining royalties has also been put off to some unspecified future date and is very unlikely to be completed within the life of this Assembly. Why should the federal government give this government any more authority over lands and resources when we haven't done anything with the authority we have?"
My experience over the past month just reinforces my belief in these statements.
Some of the specific reductions in 2018-2019 that I believe are particularly short-sighted and harmful are highlighted as follows:
The environment continues to be a low priority with Cabinet. There is no new investment in renewable or alternative energy as we wait for federal dollars to rain from heaven. The 2016 sunsetting of $760,000 of funding leveraged by Regular MLAs during the bailout of the NWT Power Corporation for diesel to replace hydropower during low water levels was never replaced in the Arctic Energy Alliance budget. When Regular MLAs proposed increases in funding for Arctic Energy Alliance, this has been rejected.
Within Environment and Natural Resources, the cutting of five positions at headquarters, four of these in corporate management that are related to communications, policy, and legislation, has seriously reduced the capacity of the department. It has a lot on its plate with at least six legislative proposals; major public policy initiatives, including the Climate Change Strategic Framework; and a heavy communications responsibility with caribou and fire management. This work is already well behind schedule, and it is not at all related to lack of effort by the staff who I have publicly commended. The problem is with the lack of funding and staff to get the job done. ENR is again one of the few departments to continue to take cuts and more are planned in the next two years.
Boreal caribou monitoring is to be cut by $150,000 at a time when the species has been listed as threatened and when a recovery strategy is under consideration that will call for more monitoring, not less.
We have seen numerous examples of government withdrawing funding when there is a hint of federal funding. Cutting our commitments to fund boreal caribou monitoring is simply wrong.
Funding for the district education authorities is also to be cut by $200,000 as part of Cabinet's fiscal reduction targets. The hope is that some sort of shared services approach will yield these savings.
MACA will cut $250,000 from its budget for multisport games support, as the lottery funds may now be used for that purpose. There will be further cuts over the next year as well.
Lastly, while I appreciate and support the changes being made in the NWT Housing Corporation, there is still no plan or funding to get our housing out of core need. Cabinet appears to have already decided that not one cent of the recently announced federal infrastructure funding is going to be used for housing as well.
In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, this is a better budget as a result of Regular MLAs working together on behalf of all of our residents. I am proud of the Regular MLAs for having pushed for improvements, and I am very happy to continue to work together with them.
However, even with the minor changes there are significant cuts, especially to the environment, and little to no effort or even consideration of new revenue sources. The overall direction from Cabinet's fiscal reduction strategy of cutting jobs, programs, and services to fund infrastructure continues in this budget.
There are some exciting initiatives in this budget, and I sincerely thank my Cabinet colleagues and their staff, and my Regular MLA colleagues for much hard work. However, on balance, I cannot support the 2018-2019 budget, given the focus on spending reductions to fund infrastructure and very limited effort to look at revenues. I will be voting against the appropriation bill. Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you. To the principle of the bill. Member for Kam Lake.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, in my reply to the budget address, I spoke of the process that led us to what we have been doing for the past several weeks in the Chamber of the House. Although I was dissatisfied with how that process played out and I felt we could have had more engagement on both sides of the House to build a budget we could all support, at the end of the day, we were forced into a situation where it has taken us to until this point to bring forward an appropriation bill.
In ideal circumstances, we would have more time to work on these issues to find a compromise. I think that is the real spirit of democracy. I have often said that, that it's not about making everyone happy, but it's about creating a budget or a bill or a proposal that everyone can live with, and that our constituents can live with as well. That is important, Mr. Speaker. I feel that we have done that with this appropriation bill.
I'm not going to speak at length to the contents of the bill itself and of the budget that we will moving forward with in 2018-2019, as I expect it will pass today, but I do want to say that many of the most troubling concerns around some of the directions the budget was taking with policy decisions and spending were resolved through the great amount of work that Members on both sides of the House did over the Committee of the Whole reviews that are often not as exciting as question period in the day-to-day business of the Assembly, but are very important because they allow us to ask these questions and do an in-depth review on each department's budget.
Ultimately, that work has been exhaustive. Every dollar has been accounted for. Every spending proposal has been questioned. At the end of the day, we have made progress on arts funding. We have had made progress on land tenure issues. We have made progress on environmental concerns. We have made progress on business support. There are other policies that will still need to be worked out. I expect we will spend the remainder of this term doing that, but again I can't look at this budget and see something I can't support. Rather, I see something that I acknowledge has taken a lot of work to get to the place it is today. That work has ultimately made a better budget, a more balanced document, and helped get the information contained within its pages out to our constituents so they understand how the government is spending their money on improving services and programs to Northwest Territories residents.
Finally, on the coming infrastructure budget and the need to continue to invest in that infrastructure budget, which is something I do support, the nature of our financial procedures requires us to pay for that infrastructure budget for what may appear as an operational surplus. It can also be thought of as the capital budget. What we don't spend on these programs and services, we are going to be spending on capital. I would disagree with the argument that it is potentially an area to cut services to pay for infrastructure. I think, rather, we need more common sense budgeting practices that allow everyone to understand exactly what we are doing when we move forward.
We are not posting surpluses year on year. We are paying for capital, and the way we do that is somewhat complex. We need plain language, common sense budgeting that everyone can follow along with, that everyone can understand, and that ultimately respects that there are two budgets in play here. One is capital and one is operations maintenance. That is the one before us today. That is how we pay for programs and services.
I'm satisfied that this government is using its limited resources in a time of reduced revenues to maximize the gains made to Northerners and to address the most pressing issues that Regular Members have brought to the floor of the House and has successfully championed over the last weeks of this sitting of the Legislative Assembly. I will be supporting the appropriation bill. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you. To the principle of the bill. Member for Nahendeh.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I stand here to speak on the principle of this appropriation bill. I guess my biggest challenge was the big cut of another $250,000 in the multi-sport games. This is now $500,000 cut from multi-sport games and this is having a huge impact on our youth and our residents, especially our future.
When speaking with the Finance Minister, this was my struggle. This was my challenge. This is something I stand up on my principles. However, as we work forward and you got to look at the big picture and look at the number of the issues here. The big issue in my riding I represent is mental health issues.
New positions, the child and youth care consultants, our counsellors, is huge in my riding. You have heard me speak about the challenges we faced in the riding. The positions now are going one in Fort Liard, one in Fort Providence, and one in Fort Simpson. There is going to be a manager. This is going to help address this issue. It's a first step and it's a positive step. I have to congratulate the Department of ECE and the Department of Health and Social Services for working on this and making it a positive step. They have a plan. They are trying to address it. They are starting with the Tlicho and the Nahendeh riding right now, slash Deh Cho. They are moving on for the next few years.
Autism and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder, that is another big issue, and I appreciate the government putting some money towards it. It is now addressing this issue, and it's helping our residents be better prepared in this issue.
You have heard me talk about equity leases here as an issue. It has been an issue ever since I got here. The Minister of Department of Lands and I have had a number of conversations, questions on the floor here. I have to applaud the Government of the Northwest Territories and Cabinet for recognizing this need. We now have put in five positions there. We are now looking forward to making a deal with this in the next three years. That is a huge step for the residents of the Northwest Territories.
We have a number of equity leases out there across the territory and we need to address this. These are people who are homeowners. They are taxpayers and they want to deal with this matter. I applaud the department for dealing with that.
Adding to government's service officers, in the small communities, these positions are huge. They have a huge impact on the riding and for the residents. They address these issues. They are the first line, I think it's what I was told, a single-window service. This is having a huge impact. The department has heard us and is dealing with this matter. They are coming up with a plan to get into all the smaller communities. I applaud the department for that.
I have seen firsthand how these positions have an impact in two of my communities that I represent, Ford Liard and Nahanni Butte. Those two positions are amazing. They do a lot of work for the residents and they are a good conduit for myself as the government as we are trying to get information out to people.
The next issue is leases. From 10 per cent, which is reasonable in some people's world, to 5 per cent. I tried to push it for 3 per cent. I applaud the Minister for actually looking at this and the department for looking at this, and we are reducing that lease to 5 per cent because it now has a huge impact on all residents of the Northwest Territories, not in any specific riding. It's all residents who are dealing with this matter, so I applaud the department for that. Again, I would love to see it at 3 per cent, but at least at 5 per cent, receiving money back into people's pockets.
The last one I would like to talk about the increase to the arts funding. The arts funding, we have heard it, we have seen it, we have had meetings where the arts community asked for increases in funding, a $200,000 for increased funding. We were able to work with the departments and the government to come up with an additional $200,000, which will help these people and help us promote our art world.
Mr. Speaker, when I first started out going through this process, I was really challenged to support this budget. People have seen me stand and rise in this House and not support the last two, but I have to applaud the departments and the government for working with us. We are not going to all have the positive relationship that we want. We don't want to get everything we need, but I have to applaud the department and the Minister for working with us on this. It is a long process. There have been a lot of letters written back and forth, a lot of communication behind the scenes, but I applaud the department and my colleagues on this side here for working together for the residents of the Northwest Territories.
At this point in time, I will be supporting the budget. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you. To the principle of the bill.
Question.
Question has been called. All those in favour? All those opposed?
---Carried
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Yellowknife South, that Bill 9, Appropriation Act (Operations Expenditures), 2018-2019, be read for the third time. Mr. Speaker, I would request a recorded vote. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. There is a motion on the floor. The motion is in order.
