Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'm pleased to be here as well, and welcome to our guests, Mr. Graham and Ms. Babcock.
I want to go after this issue of dollars and cents, because to me it's vital in the Northwest Territories. The federal government raised the borrowing limit in March to $800 million for our territory, but our borrowing right now—and a lot of it is utility borrowing that is self-financing—is at $575 million at the end of this fiscal year. We have the project, the Inuvik-Tuk highway, where we're looking at having to invest up to $100 million in that project to meet the federal commitment of $150 million. We have renovations to the Stanton hospital, which are going to run in excess of a quarter of a billion dollars. We have a number of fiscal requirements here. The $800 million might sound large, but when you take it in context with what it really is, it's going to be just a temporary measure and we'll be back to the government for more.
The question is really about what the government has put in this year's budget implementation bill. They put conditions for borrowing, and one of the conditions that I've seen through the internal documents of the Government of the Northwest Territories is that the government is going to include in the borrowing limit all self-financing debt. So this means that the types of investments that we're looking for in the Northwest Territories and in Yukon—as I see from the comments of Darrell Pasloski, the premier there—in hydro development, in transportation infrastructure, are going to be considerable.
Do you think that the self-financing part of the borrowing limit should be a condition that is set by the federal cabinet, or should we be lobbying this federal cabinet to make sure that is not part of the conditions of borrowing? I'll go to either of you to answer it if you could.