MLAs do climb-down on budget cut

Members of the legislative assembly voted last Thursday to restore $150,000 that regular members had earlier voted to delete from Department of Environment’s budget.

The discussion started during a review of supplementary appropriations – special requests for funding that was not anticipated when the original department budgets were created. Iqaluit Centre MLA Hunter Tootoo noticed a $90,000 line item for “travel costs applicable to the Inuit field officer training program,” and asked why the costs for this ongoing program were not anticipated in the budget.

Finance Minister Leona Aglukkaq reminded Tootoo that regular members had voted to delete $150,000 from the department’s training budget in order to boost a special fund used to help hunters buy equipment. On March 21, non-cabinet members defied cabinet by voting together to delete the money.

At the time, Environment Minister Olayuk Akesuk opposed the motion. He pointed out that that the $150,000 would come from the wildlife officer training program. That program immediately came on the chopping block because its $180,000 cost was the closest line item to the $150,000 that MLAs wanted to remove.

Tootoo maintained that the decision to cut this specific program was the fault of the department, and even said that he found it “almost pathetic and shameful” that the department would cut the wildlife officer training rather than revisiting their budget and spreading the cuts through different programs.

On Thursday, before the motion to restore the $150,000 was passed, Akesuk pointed out that adding more funds to the hunters’ equipment fund would not necessarily increase the amount of money paid out, unless the policy was also changed.

Seven regular members voted to restore full funding to the training program “by reallocating resources from within its existing travel and transportation budget of the Corporate Management Branch of the department.”

The motion also demands that the total funding to the disaster compensation grants for hunters and trappers be increased from $20,000 to $150,000.