Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we have to change the way we do business. I was really struck the other day when I heard what some of the current Ministers said about budget years ago when they were Regular Members. They wanted to change the way we do business. I know they are honourable and determined people and they must have tried to change the way we do business in government.
Mr. Speaker, we have now spent months reviewing business plans, working on a budget we are considering in the House. We all had input into it. Even if we don't like it all, we feel we contributed to things that the Finance Minister has mentioned in his budget address, and I thank him for that. In doing that work, we save a few jobs and some important programs that might have otherwise been cut. This is not a small thing. Those jobs and programs cost millions of dollars. We did that for the good of the people of our territory. We should be proud of that. I am proud of that and probably the Minister of Finance is too.
I think the Finance Minister knows that we did our best, but that is not good enough. We have to change the way we do business. To start with, I think it was a huge mistake. The government went out on a major campaign to cut $150 million in the budget, with a big chunk of that coming this year, 201617. To this day, I don't know why the government did that or whose idea it was. I know it wasn't mine. The worst case I heard during the 17th Assembly doesn't even come close to the cut of $150 million, so I guess I have to blame the current government, current Cabinet, since they proposed this cut. Proposing this monster cut has a very important effect. It made us all focus on the cut and how we could keep the damage to a minimum. I saw an editorial saying it should be pretty easy to cut $150 million from the government's fat budget, but it's not. They have it all wrong. We are talking about people. We are talking about people's jobs, programs that people need. The bigger the cut, the more pain it is going to cause, the more it hurts our economy, the more it impacts our population. We spend a lot of time and energy on this, just keeping what we have now. When you focus on cuts, you are not focused on what you can build, what things you can do, or thinking outside the box. The fact is, when you are fighting cuts, you are only inside the box, and you can’t even see daylight. You cannot change the way we do business.
Mr. Speaker, I think when we talked about our priorities as 19 Members, we were talking about what we want to do. What we wanted to do most, what I wanted to do most was create jobs, especially at the community level. I want more jobs available to people so people have something to work for, some goals they can reach and to be proud of, so they can live well and do what they want to do. I want to do things that help people get jobs. That could be better education. That could be onthejob training in daycares, addictions treatment, you name it. For babies and toddlers, it might be early childhood development. We all raise our kids the best we can, and we want them to grow up to be healthy and get good jobs. Mr. Speaker, if we could do one thing to change the way we do business, it should be to create jobs in small communities. Let’s set some targets for employment and figure out how to get to those targets. Can you imagine if the employment rate in small communities was 70 per cent instead of 40 per cent? There would be very little need for income support. There would be less reliance on social housing. There would be less demand for health care. I have often said, “give people jobs and you will see the jails and the hospitals empty out and the schools fill up.” I’m telling you this from my own experience. If you go to small communities and see what’s going on, the people can’t afford to buy gas for their skidoos to go hunting. Mr. Speaker, when you shoot a moose, that moose is basically worth seven to eight thousand dollars to the family. That's what you save on groceries, and it's like having a big cheque in your hand. It hurts me when I see a good hunter that cannot afford gas that he needs to put food on the family’s tables. We should be doing something about it besides putting that hunter on income support and forcing him to ask the government to maintain his house.
We know we could do this, and we could do a lot more. We could put our young adults to work. We could hire a youth officer in every community. Mr. Speaker, we could start some daycares in our communities. That would create a few jobs. It would help young kids play and learn, and get ready for school. If we did that, the kids will do better in school. “Right from the Start,” as our Education Minister says. We have to do it, not just say it. We have to do it. On top of that, the parents of those kids could find work or upgrade their own skills to find work. Mr. Speaker, we need to invest in our youth in the communities where we have no youth crime. When we see a community doing right for the youth, we should provide them the support necessary. In one community where there has been no youth in court for several years, they want to start their own community development. They needed support from this government to do two or three major capital projects, but that was not in the government’s plans. Shifting things around to support that community could not be done. The government did not have the will.
It is on the other end of the spectrum, our population is aging, and we need to take care of our elders. We should be doing everything we can so our elders can age in place in their own homes in their own communities. It might take a few simple things: a ramp, better railing, some basic homecare. Mr. Speaker, a twohour visit to our elders a few times a week or every day would cost less than moving that elder to a home somewhere else, and it would be a lot better for them. This is what our elders want, and this is how life is lived in our communities. We should train our people who need to deliver home care, building on local skills and knowledge, including Aboriginal languages. We know we need to do this, but there is no new money for home care. If you moved money around into home care, you may actually stop the Health and Social Services budget from growing year after year.
Housing is another area that needs a lot of work. Compared to the rest of Canada, we have a high percentage of homes in core need. This is not good, especially since we don’t have jobs for people that will enable them to take themselves out of core need. On average, 20 per cent of our homes are in core need. An improvement is needed in every community, including larger centres. But we can’t seem to do that. Why not? Mr. Speaker, let’s do things differently. One idea, for example, would be in the housing market communities. Let's provide $5,000 for the basic improvements targeted to energy efficient or barrier free. Upgrade the homes up to $10,000, $20,000. People could leverage this money, resulting in spending two to four times greater than what the government’s contribution will be. That would stimulate the economy, improve aging homes, create jobs, reduce the number of homes in core need, and cut our greenhouse gas emissions. All things we need to do. Instead of doing that, we spend our time working on the budget trying to save existing jobs. We pushed the Minister very hard and thought we got the message across. But every day, we hear layoffs are proceeding. We hear that casuals are losing their jobs. We hear that summer students are not being hired. We are cutting entrylevel jobs, and that is not right. The reality is: all those losses disproportionately hurt Aboriginal people in small communities.
Mr. Speaker, when I hear fire crews are reconfigured, it really means some firefighters do not get work. I never heard of a single senior manager being laid off. I don’t hear the departments getting by with one less deputy minister or fewer directors. There has been no serious cutting at the top. Millions of dollars of programming may be cut, but not a single senior manager along with it. That is, I am sorry to say, business as usual. I know a guy that always says, “cash flows uphill,” and I think that is true. Mr. Speaker, I do not want our entire term in office to be wiped out as we focus on budget cuts. That is the wrong focus. I do not want the business plan in the fall to be more of the same. I do not want next year’s budget address to tell me we need a change. I want the next budget address to tell me we need to change the way we do business, and actually deliver on the promise. I do not want to spread doom and gloom, because our territory does not need that. It's not true. My people do not complain about the weather. We go out there and we do what we need to do when the time is right, and the time is right now for us to change the way we do business. We have more than three years left in our term. We need to decide what we want to achieve, and go out and do that. We don’t want to achieve a bunch of reductions, especially reductions that take jobs from people, Mr. Speaker. What we need is to create jobs, to create jobs that are accessible to people that don’t have jobs. We will need to help some of those people upgrade their skills, whether it’s through education, onthejob training, or apprentices. We need to match what we are doing with the results we want to get.
Mr. Speaker, our government must address our severe problem with alcohol. The Department of Health and Social Services must provide more tools to the communities to address alcohol abuse. Six or seven years ago, I asked a community health nurse, “what is the greatest health risk to your community?” Without thinking about it for a second she said, “alcohol.” She went on to talk about the cost of alcohol to the health system, and I know all of those things are true. We all know the cost of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. A person with FASD is costing the system more than $1 million dollars over their lifetime. In addition, consider the impact on their family and community. We also know that FASD is 100-per-cent preventable. Mr. Speaker, supports must be put in place to eradicate FASD. If we can do that, we will see so many benefits. I don’t know where to start listing them off, but I’m going to sum it up. If we can really do that, we can change the way we do business, and we will improve the situation for our grandchildren.
Mr. Speaker, it was recently reported in the news that Canadians aged between 50 and 75 will inherit $750 billion from their parents over the next 10 years. The generation leaving us is the richest in history, but that is not the case in our small communities. People that age barely have enough money to feed themselves. I want to close with this point, Mr. Speaker, so that everyone can think about it. This is our future, and we want to leave something positive for our young people. I think that we should do that. We need to change the way we do business. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
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