Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance and the Premier. Again, because of communications or lack of same, our public has been left trying to sort of work by Braille, if you will, to figure out on what basis this government has made projections that put us into deficit a couple years or three years into our term here. This has obviously cost the public and non-government organizations, volunteer groups, a lot of resources as they try and solve this mystery.
Will the Premier commit to immediately providing the public, who are our partners and our clients, with full information that clarifies the basis on which these projections were made, and provide the sources of the information? I know the government has chosen to flip back and forth to suit their needs between the Main Estimates and the Main Estimates as revised, so I’d like that to be clear and provided immediately to the public, so that they can give us the feedback we need and are responsible to bring to this House.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Mr. Roland.
Mr. Speaker, we have provided, in tabling the documents…. It’s the first time we’ve tabled this set of documents so that they’re available for public review. The Budget Address, as well, has a lot of information on the stats and where we’ve come from. It’s not a myth out there. We’ve had to build on.... Based on our assumptions and knowing that our formula financing going forward is fixed — there’s little adjustment to that, and our growth of expenditures is there — we’re going to run into problems. So we have to take action now, before we end up in a situation where all our flexibility is gone.
During good times we should be planning and making sure we don’t end up in bad times. So we’ve had to take the steps to limit our growth or manage our growth, which means there are some changes, and reinvest some of those dollars into priority areas. We’ve got lots of information here that’s available to the public. If there’s specific questions, as we go through each department, more detail will be made available through Members’ questions to Ministers and their deputies and senior staff here. That is available to the public as well.
Mr. Speaker, I acknowledge I’ve had some remarks from the Premier. I also acknowledge that there’s tons of information out there — big thick documents. Certainly the Budget Address I find very murky. It basically talked about the top 6 or 8 per cent of the budget. I’m asking the Premier: will he provide the public with exactly the information on which the projections were based — the graph and the sources of it, the tables that show the decline in revenue and the sources of the decline in revenue and so on, the exact basis? In science, conclusions are not acknowledged until they're duplicable. To this date there is no duplicability, if you will — oh my gosh, the Hansard...
Laughter.
...to this projection. So I ask the same question again.
Mr. Speaker, as we have in past, as governments have practised, part of the Budget Address is a document on the future, the fiscal forecasting, the fiscal strategy that’s been put in place. In fact, the fiscal strategy is outlined in the document that was tabled, part of the address that’s available to the public. In the back section under B-3, it shows in the graphs that if we don’t make any changes, that’s where we would end up. Those are based on the information we have available right now through our formula financing, with our agreement with the federal government, our own-source revenues, and estimates are made.
We also have to mention that science says we come from monkeys.
I have to say, going back to some of the remarks I’ve heard from the Minister and the Premier.... I don’t, of course, debate the need to live within our means and so on. That’s not what this is about. This is about clarity and communication.
The public has gone to hire economists from afar to try and make sense of this murkiness, and it’s still not clear. Somehow there seems to be a gap between the Premier’s understanding of the situation and the public’s. Will the Premier address this gap and make it plain?
If the Member is talking about the Parkland report, that’s one thing — hired by the unions in the Northwest Territories to look at our numbers, come up with their assumptions and present those, in a sense, to question where we’ve come from as a government. I disputed those numbers. As the Member stated, we can both — the government and people out there — look at numbers, put them on a scale and say things are actually quite good.
Talk about the surplus. The surplus is a planned surplus so we can fund our capital programs. I’ve been saying that for years and I continue to say it. We need that surplus to help us with our capital programs. That surplus comes from O&M expenditures we spend on an annual basis.
So if there are avenues to put more clarity out there, that’s one thing. I believe, for example, it started — and I think it’s a good process — with Members having a pre-budget consultation process. We are taking that advice in our work, as well, and I think that’s another avenue we can use in doing that. We’ve got lots of information here now that’s available. We’ve got all the detail in here now that they can have a look at. Once they have specific questions on those areas, we’ll try to address them.
Thank you, Mr. Roland. Oral questions. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko.
