Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'm going to be trying something a little bit different this year. Last year I spent a couple of weeks honing and writing a statement that ended up running out of about 20 minutes and had every possible idea that I could put into it, not unlike the Member for Range Lake that just laid out quite a -- I don't know what to call that -- a mandate, I suppose. But what I'm going to give this year is an initial reaction to the budget. You know, we just heard the Minister's speech, and I want to some of my initial thoughts, and just to hedge that with saying, you know, obviously, the budget is now out. I want an opportunity to engage with my constituents, hear from people, hear if people have concerns with anything, and develop kind of a final position on it after doing that.
Mr. Speaker, something that stood out to me, I had a constituency meeting on Monday, and I reached out to a colleague and said, you know, in some ways I'm a bit unsure how to react to this budget. There's not a whole lot in there to get very angry or particularly excited about. And, again, maybe I need to be changing the coffee that I'm drinking in the morning because certainly the Member for Range Lake found a lot to get excited about in there. But anyways, the point being, Mr. Speaker, is, you know, we -- what I've seen, and similar to the Member for Range Lake, is a pretty status quo budget. You know, it's not a budget -- I had some constituents express concern that they were going to see some heavy cuts coming forward. Considering all the communication about fiscal responsibility that we've heard over the past year, people thought this was going to be a really difficult budget. I'm not seeing big, big changes, and I'm not seeing big initiatives either.
And so we just heard from the Finance Minister. We heard the messaging of the government. So what story do I see?
Mr. Speaker, the story that emerged for me over the past two weeks while committee was reviewing the budget is I see us struggling to action some of our priorities effectively because we are struggling to manage our finances effectively. As pointed out previously, we have not been able to follow the government's own Restoring Balance fiscal policy. The Minister speak to this, spoke to the reasons for it. But the bottom line is we haven't done it. And I think that we are also not substantively actioning some of our priorities. In a few cases, I do think that we are heading in the right direction and starting to get on the right track. I want to acknowledge good work where I see it. Over the past year, the government has established a health care sustainability unit, hired a public administrator, actions that tell us that they're taking the difficulties that we're having with the health care system keeping it sustainable, keeping it fiscally sustainable primarily also, and they're taking that seriously and actioning that. We are yet to see what that looks like. I've got a bit more to say about that later.
When I was listening to the Premier's speech the other day, I noted that, you know, there's a fair bit in there about the safe communities priority. They have taken a fair bit of action, and I'm looking forward to seeing results from that. The one critique I might make is what I don't see attached to the actions is are we trying to measure anything, have we set targets, what is the target that we're trying to achieve, and what does success look like. I think in some cases that is our biggest struggle, is communicating what is success going to look like for this government.
Mr. Speaker, departments have made millions of dollars in operational cuts, significant cuts over the past year. They have been trying. I would note that this year it was largely offset by a new collective agreement that added $74 million per year that we have to find the money for. I believe the government speak for this is forced growth, as we like to call it. One Member did point out that some of the growth is forced. We also have a lot of excluded employees, and we make a choice to increase their salaries at the same level that we increase unionized staff; so it's not all forced, there are choices involved in some of the growth that we're seeing.
Mr. Speaker, I was reflecting last night -- we were looking at the supplementary estimates. And I was reflecting last night on, you know, my experience in the previous government that I sat in the leadership seat for at the City of Yellowknife and the fact that at the municipal level, the government really struggles to make ends meet. The government really pinches pennies and squeezes the most out of every possible dollar. And I spoke to, you know, sometimes I would walk the halls of city hall and honestly feel a bit guilty. These weren't fancy offices. This wasn't a, you know, a government that was rife with cash. In some cases, I think -- you know, this is just a little shout out to our city, but, you know, city hall could really use some renovations. But this was a government that has to balance its budget every single year. This is a government that has to make tough decisions. You'd see city staff driving around in a pickup truck from 1995 because tough decisions have to be made, and we have to stretch every dollar.
I'm not sure I see the same level of penny pinching at the GNWT yet. The Member for Range Lake pointed out that there's been a spending freeze but over the years, you know, the government has very nice buildings, they have very nice offices, they have nice vehicles. There's many things that tell me that this is not a government that is trying to squeeze the most out of every possible dollar that we can. That's just what I've seen. It's just a comparison that I make between the way the municipality operates and the way our government operates.
Mr. Speaker, I want to talk to one of the issues that I think keeps coming up for me and continues to be a problem that vexes our ability to move forward.
Mr. Speaker, the government did articulate a mandate, and MLAs worked hard to set very focused priorities. I don't think that we did enough to establish specific targets or identify exactly what we meant and, as I mentioned earlier, define what success would like look for those priorities. What do we mean? What do we mean success is going to look like for our housing priority, for example.
And one of the frustrations that I find myself repeating and becoming a bit of a broken record on is priority implementation. We have to focus on the priorities we've set. This has got -- our mandate has got to be where we focus our energy. And, Mr. Speaker, I don't think priority implementation is as difficult as we're making it out to be.
I think of one of my constituents. Of course I'm going to change their name for their privacy. We're going to call her Emily today. Emily is seeking a unit in public housing. She has a disabled son, facing significant challenges. Emily really, really needs a home. I have been e-mailing back and forth with the housing Minister's staff and the housing Minister herself for a year now trying to get Emily off of the waiting list into a home, a home that's accessible, something that's appropriate for her and her son to live in, to hopefully thrive, to better the conditions that they're currently living in. It's really easy for me to see that one of my priorities has to be getting Emily into a home. And so when I think about our priorities, when I think about actioning priorities, it's very easy for me to take Emily on one hand and say, yes, that I've absolutely no doubt that putting her in a public housing unit is something that needs to happen, an accessible public housing unit. And I can take any number of activities that the government is doing -- I'm not going to name them, I'm not going to name a specific thing here -- but I'm going to say that I can say many of them and say is this as high a priority for me as putting Emily in a home. It is not. This is the priority. It is clear as day to me. And I think that we need to go through that kind of exercise. We have got to look within. We've got to determine what is important, what is most important -- that's what priorities mean -- and we have to determine what can we let go of in order to make substantive and real change and real action toward the priorities that we've set. That's what priority setting looks like. And I think everybody in this room must have an Emily. It's really easy for me when that's the exercise that I go through.
And I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, that if we have to make difficult decisions, that is a very easy story for me to bring back to my constituents. It's very easy for me to say this is the reason a difficult decision had to be made because we're doing this, we are doing a good thing, we're doing a moral thing, we're doing what government should be doing. What's difficult is if we're just saying we're doing fiscal responsibility because we need to save money. That's not the most compelling story you can tell a constituent. We had to make this difficult decision you don't like. Well, the government's running out of money. We're doing a lot of things with it, big mixture of things, but we can't put Emily in a home because we're out of money. And this leads me to a point that I've also been speaking to and I think also is one of the high level problems that is preventing us from moving forward in a positive way.
In a lot of cases, we are either struggling to or not measuring the results of what we're doing. So when I hear talk about new revenue sources, also known as taxes, things that residents don't want to be hearing about, can I reasonably say that we are getting good value for money out of all of the programs that the government offers and we absolutely need to put this revenue source in place in order to make it happen? It's a very difficult thing to say yes to. It's difficult because we're not measuring some of the things that we're doing. We don't have good measures to help us determine is this program working? Is it achieving what we need it to achieve? You know, the finance Minister implemented -- started to implement GRI last term. I think it was a great initiative. It hasn't quite taken on the urgency that I think it needed to in order for it to help us with these kind of decisions. What is working, what isn't, how can we move resources in such a way to help us succeed.
I want to speak a bit to some of the priorities that are important to me in this budget. Housing is top of mind, again.
I want to recognize that political decision-making often gets ahead of a government's ability to implement. Where we're at right now is the Department of Housing NWT is currently doing a lot of work to implement the priorities that were set and the direction that was given in the previous Assembly. This is a problem that I encountered at the city also, that council's decision-making got way ahead of administration's ability to actually carry out the various plans and things that we're approving to the point where plans were getting left behind and forgotten and council was approving new plans. It can happen here too. So I recognize that in a lot of ways, the decisions that we make here about housing and the path that we set forward is going to be something that is going to have to carry into the future of the next Assembly. But, Mr. Speaker, if we don't clearly lay that path out now, if we don't establish targets, if we don't tell residents what success is going to look like and what we're trying to achieve, we are failing to tell our story and we are failing to effectively action the priority that we set.
On housing, we just received a presentation from a researcher and the Standing Committee on Social Development has been working very hard on the housing as a human right. And something that the presenter highlighted to me is the idea of self-sufficiency. And this was a big theme in our priority setting session which I think has been lost along the way. But it's right there at the beginning of our priorities. The 20th Assembly wants a territory where people are supported, where they want to live, work, and grow. What that meant to me, and for people who weren't in the room when we were having those conversations, MLAs were advocating for building up people's self-sufficiency, self-reliance, reducing the amount of dependence on government. So I do take a small pause when I talk about the housing priority that I don't think that the status quo, that the system, as it is, is going to be that success that I'm speaking about. I think that we need to change significantly what we're doing. And so that's going to take planning. It's going to take time. This is not a problem that we can just throw money at. But I can tell you that we are not funding it adequately to succeed right now.
The presenter emphasized the need for us to foster self-sufficiency and self-reliance, agency over decisions, increased attention to education and skill development, and the potential for the housing sector to create local economic development. Those are things that I want us to be focusing on in our plan for housing in the story that we're telling and the targets that we're setting for this department and this priority.
Mr. Speaker, I want to turn to health a little bit. As I noted, a lot of action has been taken regarding health care sustainability. I think this is good. I think it's necessary. I do want to put a small caveat on it that I am a little bit worried that health is going to end up, by virtue of the fact that we've created these systems, that we brought in the administrator, that we brought in the health care sustainability unit, that we could be at risk of throwing the baby out with the bath water. And we need to remember that one of the priorities we set was increasing people's access to primary care. So in fostering health care sustainability, I just want us to be careful to note that we are still looking to increase the service the residents are getting on the ground.
Economic development, I could say a lot. I'm starting to run out of time. I just want to very quickly say, and I said this in my reply to the Budget Address last year, education is a big piece of this. I spoke to it with housing. I will be speaking in the House this session about workforce development again, and I certainly have a lot to say about Aurora College. I'm very concerned about how the college is operating, Mr. Speaker.
In the past weeks, my community colleagues have joined me in being concerned as they watched the community learning centres close. At least we can say the college is dealing out something to be concerned about for everyone, but I'm not really sure this is what we had in mind. It's a very big concern for me, Mr. Speaker. I've spoken extensively about my belief in the dream of what Aurora College could be. I'm going to continue fighting for it.
And I want to highlight again self-sufficiency and its importance in our priorities. If we want to develop our economy, we have to focus on our workforce, on the students who aren't being prepared to enter it, and how we're going to get them the credentials they need to participate meaningfully in the economy. It is such a big piece.
To close, Mr. Speaker, I want to speak about something I saw in the news the other day. One of my favorite pundits, Chantal Hebert, was reflecting on the coming situation with Mr. Trump being elected and she was saying, you know, what I want to see and what I'm not seeing yet, is who is going to rise up and be the adult in the room. Who is going to set, you know, this political bickering aside -- she was talking about the political leaders -- and actually stand up, be the adult in the room, do the things that need to be done. I really appreciated that characterization. And I think that we need to stand up and be the adults in the room. Difficult decisions need to be made. I want to emphasize that we need to be measured and careful. We have to acknowledge that this territory's economy relies largely on government. Cuts are going to hurt. We have to do it in a careful way. We have to do it in a way that promotes our priorities. We have to do it in a way that minimizes the pain, that ensures that what we're doing is effective, that we are actioning our priorities effectively. We need to approach our challenges with reason, with evidence, with strength of conviction, with decisiveness, and resolve. Do we have the courage to be the -- and the strength to be the leaders this territory needs right now, to be the adults in the room?
Over the past year, Mr. Speaker, I have had my moments of doubt. When I see us looking at cuts, I hear well, we don't want to do this, don't want to do that; yes, we absolutely need to make tough decisions but not that one. Around and around we go on the wheel of consensus government. Do we have the humility, Mr. Speaker, to look at ourselves in how we contribute to this problem and stand up, be the adults in the room, and make the tough decisions? I want to be optimistic, Mr. Speaker. I believe that a majority of Members in this chamber are up to the task. This room is full of people who I respect, who have shown me they are prepared to do what's needed to get this territory on a positive track. Let's come together and build consensus around the work that needs to be done. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member from Frame Lake. Colleagues, we're going to have a brief break because we have two more replies to the budget today. So we're going to take a brief break.
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