Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the ideas and intentions behind this budget really resonate with me. Practical and realistic that certainly is my style of doing things. I agree we need to pay down more of our debt and live more within our means.
We heard from the finance Minister that this budget is about value and efficiency, not just reductions. I do appreciate the thought that has been put into streamlining efforts of departments where there was previously overlap such as merging responsibilities for immigration and arts funding that were previously split between ECE and ITI and merging the technology services centre with information systems shared services. I am also excited about centralized mobile fleet management i truly am, yeah, okay. So we can make more efficient use of our large fleet of vehicles. I also agree that it's not sustainable or wise to tackle every problem by adding another GNWT position. We cannot solve our economic problems, including low employment in some communities, by hiring everyone to work for the government. Where I start to get nervous is when I get the feeling that each department is being asked to do more with less.
Now, some people imagine that the government is made up of lazy office workers so of course we should be asking them to do more. They just need to learn how to hustle like their counterparts in the private sector. But in my experience, when we ask everyone in every department to do more with less, the burden usually falls disproportionately on the shoulders of those who are already doing the most; those who are the most dedicated and motivated, who will always take on more because no one else will do it. And most of the burden ends up falling on the frontline service providers that we often take for granted, as well as the nonprofits who take on some of the hardest frontline work that, frankly, no one else will do.
We demand more from our nurses and doctors who take on more and more patients in an emergency room that's bursting at the seams, who cover more and more shifts, and on top of this are expected to train a revolving door of locums and agency nurses.
We demand more from our teachers, who we expect to somehow improve attendance rates and graduate more kids even when facing classrooms where 80 to 90 percent could have language or learning disabilities.
We take for granted that the frontline workers at our nonprofits, our shelters for example, will just keep taking more and more people into the shelters, well beyond their capacity, because they don't want to leave anyone in the cold. Meanwhile, many of those seeking shelter these days are under the influence of harder drugs than we're used to seeing before, there is more lateral violence, and yet shelter workers are supposed to manage it all with the same resources as before, or bounce people over to the emergency room or the police, which are also overwhelmed.
Now we see in the business plans that this government states it will help nonprofits by pointing them towards funding from elsewhere. I suspect that might lead us to hiring another GNWT employee to write funding proposals for nonprofits, which I would note is an example of exactly what we have pledged not to do, trying to solve each problem by hiring another GNWT worker. When the money that would have gone to a salary could just as easily have been given to the NGO to do the work themselves.
Mr. Speaker, I understand that this government is not a money tree. I understand that it is our role to make tough choices as the finance Minister has emphasized. But, Mr. Speaker, our frontline workers in many areas are reaching a breaking point. We talk about the fiscal cliff that we're trying to back away from but what about the cliff that our social services are teetering on the edge of? I am concerned this budget does not lead our health system or our shelter system away from that cliff.
Now, the message from the finance Minister was that this was never intended to be an austerity budget or cuts for the sake of cuts. The problem is that in each department's scramble to find things to cut, we tend to reach for the things that might ruffle the least feathers, the opportunities where we see vacancies or retirements. And that's not necessarily making the tough choices. It gets really tempting to scrap the things that haven't worked out yet, the programs that have turned out to cause frustration and conflict, things that now feel really annoying and we just want to be done with them. The problem is that in some cases we're giving up on important things that we actually need in the longterm even if we haven't yet realized the vision of what they are supposed to be.
A prime example is the transformation of Aurora College into a polytechnic university.
The money seems to have dried up for continuing the transformation process. And this budget is letting the Centre for Learning, Teaching and Innovation fade away even though that was where accredited programs were being developed, and we're reducing general Aurora College funding as well. Now I understand that everyone is frustrated that this project hasn't worked out as hoped. But this territory needs a highquality postsecondary institution for so many reasons. We cannot let this vision die or get distracted by conflicts and rivalries between different communities. We absolutely need an institution where young people from the North can get recognized degrees in anything from teaching, environmental science, trades, Indigenous governance, film things that would open up a world of opportunities for our people. We need an institution where we can do worldclass research in northern issues like permafrost thaw, mining innovations, climate change adaptation, Indigenous culture and language revitalization, remediation. We need an institution that can attract students from around the world because we have something unique and valuable to offer.
This kind of institution can be an economic driver for the territory, both as a source of direct revenues in the form of tuition and research dollars, and as a way to produce a highquality labour force. Mr. Speaker, we are so far from achieving that vision, and it's so tempting to put it on a back burner during a time of fiscal restraint, but it's now more than ever we need to make significant progress towards realizing the vision of a polytechnic university.
Another example of where we are scrapping something with an absence of vision is the proposed elimination of the Office of the Children's Lawyer. I understand there has been frustration with this office and uncomfortable relationships with other government agencies, but I would argue we need to step back and think about why we established this office in the first place. Our system does not always make decisions that are in the best interests of children, especially children in care, and we need to change that about our system. Now, there may be different ways to accomplish this so let's talk about that and get going. But this budget, unfortunately, creates an even bigger vacuum that takes us further from that goal.
We are trying to scrimp and save in health care but without a clear overarching vision of what we're trying to achieve, I believe that if we invest more now in staff retention and in health care workforce planning, we may see an increase to our budgets upfront during these main estimates but we will save vast amounts of money in the longterm because we won't see the huge deficits piling up and the constant requests for supplementary funds. We're failing to properly cost out our needs, failing to determine the right number of positions, the right composition of professionals to make up our primary care teams, but we hang over everyone's head in the system this scolding that they should be saving more money, that our system is too expensive. So managers try to skimp and cut corners, perhaps on staff benefits or not giving people the vacation time they're allotted, or we allow shifts to go unfilled, but then we lose our staff and then we scramble and then we end up paying far more by the end of the year for the agency nurses and locums to fill the gaps.
So this myth that we start out having no money is a dangerous trap, and it can lead us to these costly and shortsighted decisions. So instead our focus needs to be on building up value in the system, and the most valuable thing we have is our human resources.
Now, over the past few months, I had the privilege and chance to tour a number of facilities, the new Liwegoati Building in Yellowknife, the Children’s First Child Care Facility in Inuvik, the Gwichin Wellness Camp, and I've been reflecting that we have invested a lot in truly impressive, stateoftheart infrastructure. But have we remembered to invest enough in our human resources? Because we are struggling to sustain programming and actually staff these stateoftheart facilities.
Now in terms of energy solutions, we are still all about the megaprojects. And then we encounter debacles like the insanely expensive Inuvik wind turbine system with its ballooning costs. And this might be enough to make us want to give up on renewable energy solutions entirely. Yet the most costeffective steps are often the incremental ones, the small retrofits, switches to wood stoves and biomass heating. And I would propose a pilot project on renewable diesel, which I'll be speaking about later this session. But these are not the exciting megaprojects, so they're easy to ignore or reduce because few will notice that they're gone. The problem is we have failed so far to articulate a coherent energy vision. It just seems too overwhelming and expensive. And yet we always find money at the end of each year to subsidize our power corporation, to subsidize diesel through supplementary funding when our use skyrockets due to low water or the price of diesel goes up.
The common theme that I'm trying to point out here is that when we lack a clear vision and clear plans, it costs us more in the end. We need a clear vision for economic development, and I believe it needs to be centered around the how, not the what.
I do not think that it is government's role to pick which is the next industry that's going to save us all. The goal is to reduce dependency, to build up our human resources, and to ensure we don't have so many jobs and contracts going south.
Now, we've talked a lot lately about ending the dependency that stems from colonialism. It's important to remember that we need to both avoid dependency on government and avoid dependency on any one industry. We cannot hand over our fate to a handful of multinational corporations when their decisions are ruled by global commodity price fluctuations, boom and bust patterns, not to mention geopolitical games with China. I'm not saying industry is bad; I'm just saying we have to focus on things we have the most control over, and that is our own human resources.
Now, my colleague from Inuvik Boot Lake spoke to us passionately about being resource rich and cash poor. So we need to turn some of those resources into cash.
Now diamond mines were likely the best cash cow we could ever wish for, one of the few types of resource extraction that doesn't require shipping out massive amounts of material, which is obviously extremely expensive in the NWT due to our transportation and infrastructure challenges. Diamond mines were our chance to finally lay the foundations for real social and economic progress. But we have fallen short. We largely failed to seize the opportunity to make lasting investments in our children, in our education and health systems and, as a result, in our workforce. We cannot afford to keep making this mistake.
I also don't believe that economic diversification is the magic bullet that will save us, at least not when it means sprinkling seeds in every direction, hoping that something will bear fruit if we keep pumping government funds indefinitely into every sector.
I am encouraged that in this budget and business plans we will be developing a Macroeconomic Policy Framework, that the mantra now is not to pick the winners but to create an environment where northern businesses can flourish and be competitive. That includes ensuring housing availability for workers. It also means changing the way we structure our contracts, using our procurement power to help incubate northern solutions and innovations. The big picture of the economy basically comes down to what can we offer that the world is demanding? What can we offer that has a higher value and lower cost than anyone else?
I can't help but think that our best bet is to invest in our ideas, our cultures, our stories, which can attract investment in the form of a university, film, art, tourism. The areas where we face our biggest challenges in terms of our remoteness, the climate change threats to transportation and infrastructure, these also make us unique and so they present opportunities to come up with northern solutions, northern innovations, in partnership with researchers from around the world, and it's these kinds of ideas and innovations that we can be exporting.
So instead of starting by picking an industry, above all I believe we need to cultivate excellence in everything that we do so that we can develop things to offer and sell that are competitive not just in the North but in a global environment. The only way forward is to move away from dependence, from crutches, from excuses about how we can't expect the NWT to really thrive because of all the special challenges that we face. I do still have hope, Mr. Speaker, that we can cultivate a culture of excellence in government. That's how we will develop value and efficiency. So when things are going sideways, instead of making the easy cuts we need to go back to the drawing board, figure out why things have gone wrong, refocus our vision and redouble our efforts. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
