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NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
Northwest Territories Finance Minister Michael Miltenberger says he can "live with" a deficit federal budget that focuses largely on cutting spending and regulatory reform.

"Well, it's a deficit budget," he said. "Minister Flaherty has probably one of the toughest political jobs in the country, thousands of people giving him advice, making demands, and they put together this budget. We'll live with it."

The budget includes cutting 19,200 federal public service jobs and $160.6 million to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, but Miltenberger said he is waiting for more details about exactly what those cuts will mean for Northerners.

"The position cuts, once again, we are waiting to see in detail where that's spread across the land. There are a significant number of those jobs that are going through attrition, retirement, that sort of thing. So, we have to see, what does it mean up here?" said Miltenberger. "There's not a lot of detail about a lot of these issues yet."

As expected, the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Partnership program (ASEP), which among other things, helps fund the Mine Training Society, was not renewed. Miltenberger said the territorial government has been lobbying Ottawa to find some way of filling the void.

"It is an area of significant concern," said Miltenberger. "This program, we believe, has shown us value and we haven't given up the hope and the lobbying that we could come up with some replacement to help so there isn't just a big vacuum here."

Miltenberger was bombarded with questions about regulatory reform involving large mining and other resource development projects and how it would work with devolution.

"Our concern, of course, is that we have to provide assurance to the people, to ourselves, that we can still protect the environment when we look at resource development, that we have the tools," said Miltenberger. "This is a course of action that we would not have chosen. The federal government has made a decision, and I have a plan to deal with that reality, so the aboriginal governments will deal with things as they see fit, as will other folks, as a government working on devolution to take over land, water and resource development. "

He said the budget's focus on finding new markets for Canadian resources could be good for the NWT.

"I think it bodes well for things like Avalon, Nechalacho, the rare earths, where a couple weeks ago I was at a function where we met with Korean financiers that are very interested in that type of opportunity," Miltenberger said.

The budget also extends a 15-per-cent mineral exploration tax credit and has allocated $12.3-million over two years for a diamond valuation and royalty assessment program. Miltenberger said the program will focus on branding and evaluation of the diamond industry in the North.

Meanwhile, Dennis Bevington, the NDP MP for the Western Arctic, said he does not support the budget.

"We're not on side with the changes to (Old Age Security), we're not on side with the cuts to departmental spending. In many ways those cuts are going to have an affect on the economy going forward, but they're also going to have an impact on the services to Canadians," said Bevington.

He is taking a wait-and-see approach to news that Health Canada will open an office in Yellowknife and he predicts that the federal job cuts could have a significant impact on the North.

"That represents about five per cent of the federal work force, Bevington said. "So if we saw cuts of five per cent to federal employees in the Northwest Territories, that would probably amount to between 50 and 100 people and that could come out of any number of different agencies."

Not surprisingly, he also took issue with regulatory reforms indicated in the budget.

"I think that we're facing a time where the Conservative government is coming down for political and ideological reasons on the environment. Cutting environmental assessment funding, taking out agencies like the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, changing the Fisheries Act, these are things that demonstrate to me a government that doesn't care about the environment," Bevington said.

- with files from Galit Rodan

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