Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Infrastructure.
So the Office of the Auditor General in its audit of the Stanton P3 project recommended the GNWT publicly report costs related to the Legacy Hospital Building leasing arrangement and to provide updates to total project costs when there are significant changes over the 30-year term. Now, the GNWT has disagreed and declined to publicly report those costs.
Can the Minister explain who or what the government is protecting by refusing to publicly report these costs? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. Minister of Finance -- or Infrastructure.
Either way, Mr. Speaker, on this one, thank you for the question. Mr. Speaker, this report from the auditor general, every single other recommendation the GNWT has accepted. It's singularly around the classification of the Liwego'ati Building as being whether a P3 or not a P3 that we continue to have this issue. If it is a commercial lease, we do not report any of our commercial leases publicly. They are proprietary information to the landlord. Because we have classified this one as a commercial lease, it is proprietary information, it is reported by constituency, by community, as every other commercial lease is. This one is no different. There's no matter of any -- then when people are being protected, Mr. Speaker, it's the same as on every other commercial lease. We don't report them publicly. They are not part of the P3 reporting. They are held separate. But on every other aspect of the audit, we were more than happy to accept the recommendations. And, quite frankly, we're already making the changes. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So the Minister's claiming this is a case just like any other commercial lease. Does the GNWT hold any other commercial leases where we actually own the building and we've leased it to someone and then subleased it back from them? Is there any other cases of any other building or any other commercial lease that works that way in the territory? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, to my knowledge this is a unique situation. It was also a unique opportunity, Mr. Speaker. It's not one that was -- any Member of this Cabinet was in government at the time. What we had is a building that we owned that needed to be remediated, and we needed to remediate it at significant costs. This is a large building, a medical building, and the remediation would be significant. So that was included as part of the leasing arrangement.
Subsequent to that -- and I think this is where there starts to be some challenges. And subsequent to that, it was identified that we would, in fact, need space for long-term care. And so instead, we already had the cost sharing or the agreement -- revenue sharing agreement in place. With that revenue sharing agreement in place, Mr. Speaker, we were able to go into the Liwego'ati Building, go back to the commercial party, negotiate a lease with them, with our revenue sharing agreement in place we got a better deal as a result of that, and that's the situation we find ourselves in. That's a fairly unique circumstance as compared to any other lease in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister of Infrastructure. Final supplementary. Member from Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So the Minister has just claimed that subsequent to the lease, we realized -- or the government realized that it needed more space for health care services but, in fact, it was as early as 2014 that the government had recognized that more space was needed for health care services. Can the Minister explain why that was not taken into account when this lease agreement was first arranged with Ventura? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, this, again -- more than happy to say if we want to admit wrongdoing, that looking back ten years ago we don't have all of the records that we should have in order to explain that decision. None of us were here. I wasn't here.
What I can say, Mr. Speaker, to the best of the knowledge today, at the time in 2014, the plan that health and social services was to build a new and standalone long-term care facility, and then when that project would have been ready to move forward closer, if I recall correctly, to the 2019, 2020 -- or rather 2020, the situation had changed, the markets had changed, commercial realities had changed, and costs had gone up significantly for new builds and at that time -- I believe it was at that time that the decision was made to, in fact, reutilize this building where we already a revenue sharing agreement rather than going and building new.
So, Mr. Speaker, if we want to now -- and, again, one of the recommendations was to keep better records. Agreed, and we'll do that going forward. But in this case, that's the history that brought us here. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister of Infrastructure. Oral questions. Member from Frame Lake.
