Capital budgets have been capped at $260 million in the GNWT’s interim budget.
Finance Minister Caroline Wawzonek tabled the budget in the Legislative Assembly on Feb. 7.
“It will come as no surprise that flooding, drought, wildfire events and the global COVID-19 pandemic have all negatively impacted the government’s financial capacity,” she said during a sitting. “We have capped the budget for large capital projects at $260 million to better reflect what the GNWT can deliver in a year. This single action returned the government’s medium-term outlook to a more sustainable path.”
Wawzonek added the GNWT updated its fiscal responsibility policy to require any budgeted consolidated debt not exceed $120 million less than the limit imposed by the federal government, For the NWT that limit is $1.3 billion.
Noting the GNWT gets 80 per cent of its revenue from federal transfer payments, Wawzonek cautioned the GNWT was going to need a lot of money to be prepared for future needs, both those the government can see coming and the big surprises.
She said the government would need to adopt a strong fiscal strategy to manage the financial problems presented by last year’s wildfire season, the Covid-19 pandemic, multiple years of flooding, an economy largely dependent on mining and few new mining projects coming online.
To reduce costs, Wawzonek said a “government renewal initiative” was underway, with departments identifying redundancies and repeating of services offered.
When asked by Tu Nedhé-Wiilideh MLA Richard Edjericon if cuts were coming to the public service and if remote communities would feel the brunt of the cuts, Wawzonek dismissed notions the GNWT was planning any staffing cuts as rumours and emphasized she was not looking at any public sector cuts.
“The budget isn’t parsed out one community at a time,” she said. “I certainly don’t want any residents feeling they don’t get a fair shake out of the government. Cuts to programs and services has to be the last thing that we look at. We’ve laid ourselves a path, it’s our opportunity to take it, with government renewal and with the data that’s been gathered by Health Sustainability. Can we actually look at spending our money better and more wisely now that we have that data available to us so we can bring ourselves to a better fiscal situation without cuts?
“The work that we do as a government can’t happen with the public service. That is, I hope, not a rumour that’s out amongst the public service in that where we’re going to be starting, Having responsible fiscal policies does not necessarily require us to go out and get rid of those people who deliver our programs and services. It does mean looking at how we do things. How can we look internally to fund, so we’re not continually adding new positions when we’re not managing the house that we’re in.
“I certainly want to emphasize to the public servants out there that this doesn’t need to happen without them at the forefront telling us how we can do better.”