New N.W.T. assembly heading into first budget session

Northwest Territories MLAs return to the legislature today for their longest and most important sitting so far this term.

The 19th assembly will spend most of the next two months reviewing the proposed 2020-21 operating budget. The newly-elected representatives will also unveil a detailed list of the tasks they're going to take on over the next three and a half years.

Those two tasks overlap, since all of the jobs on the to-do list will require money.

"That's what this session is really about, it's 'Okay, we want to do this, but where are we finding the money?'" said caucus chair Rylund Johnson.

The draft budget is more the work of the last assembly than this one, which began its term just four months ago.

"The business planning for it was done by the last assembly," said Johnson. "It's not an austerity budget, but there's not a lot of new initiatives within that. The new initiatives to fund the mandate will come as individual bills to the house."

Those bills, called supplementary appropriations, will be introduced and debated both before and after 2020-21 draft budget is revealed, which is scheduled to happen Feb. 25. But this assembly's ability to initiate change is hampered by the difficult financial position the government is in.

Expenses rise while revenues remain flat

As the last assembly emphasized on numerous occasions, expenses continue to increase while revenues remain flat, pushing the government closer to its federally-imposed debt limit of $1.3 billion. With the territories' two biggest diamond mines on the wane and nothing on the horizon to replace them, the government's financial situation is more likely to get worse before it gets better.

"The largest issue that all of us are facing is just the fiscal reality of the Northwest Territories," said Johnson. "When we go and set priorities as new members, there's kind of this hesitancy to not dream bigger and not have bold ideas due to the funding implications."

Johnson said that in establishing its mandate — the government's to-do list for the next three and a half years — this assembly learned to keep it realistic. The last assembly's mandate grew to 230 separate tasks.

"During the last assembly, there was this issue that the mandate was open to amendment by regular members," said Johnson, who is in his first term as an MLA. "So things got put in there that perhaps the government wasn't really willing to do or had the funding [for], so there was this kind of disagreement throughout the whole assembly of well, who actually owns the mandate."

This time, MLAs have agreed that the government is responsible for the mandate and the MLAs who are not in cabinet are responsible for providing oversight and making sure the government is implementing the tasks listed in the mandate.

"And I would say this assembly has been extremely co-operative to date," said Johnson. "Everyone's kind of buying into the mandate. And the earlier you get that buy-in, then the next four years we're not really fighting, which was an issue identified by the last assembly."

MLAs are scheduled to release their mandate to the public on Feb. 10. Finance Minister Caroline Wawzonek is scheduled to give her budget address and release the draft 2020-2021 operating budget on Feb. 25.