Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are three weeks into what is our traditional annual six-week budget session. It’s not one of my favourite activities, I must say. Our Finance Minister goes out there, he stands up in this House, he makes a budget address. We all go out in the Great Hall; we have a media scrum. They say, what do you think of the budget? What, like as if we didn’t know, what was in the budget?
The way consensus government should work is that way before the budget address is given, we, as committee members, who oversee different departments of this government, have an input into the budget through business planning, through a review of those business plans and those main estimates before it ever gets to the floor of this House. However, on a $1.6 billion budget, there are things that we would like to highlight, profile and give some enhancement to, which represents a very, very small fraction of the budget. I won’t state the exact amount, but it’s less than 1 percent of the whole budget.
To achieve that end, we are prepared to defer, hold up, stall this process so that we can make our point. My point is we have so many other ways to do that. I would seriously rather stand up here and devote an extra hour of question period on every department in the government and let the Minister stay there and answer the question to the benefit of the public so the public can know what the issues are.
What we do in Committee of the Whole, as you know, is we spend hours and hours and hours… I mean, even the media goes home. They don’t even stay in the media booth when we go into Committee of the Whole. I mean, let’s be honest.
I don’t know; I’m a get ‘er done kind of person. Not to take away from the hard work of some of my colleagues on this side of the House, but you know we can’t add to the budget, and even if we could, we’re not in a fiscal position to add to the budget right now. We know that, we all know that. Let’s be real.
So if you have something to say, stand up and say it. If you’ve got a question to ask, ask the question, but this haggling over half of a percent of the total $1.6 billion operating budget, I just think we could be doing something better with our time.
If I had my way and it wouldn’t offend the Members on this side of the House, I’d stand up and move a motion to accept the full budget as it stands. Let’s get on with it. Let’s talk about some things that are important to the people of the Northwest Territories, but this ain’t happening in Committee of the Whole. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.
