Don Stewart

Thanks, Mr. Chair. The way the formula works in terms of the grant from Canada is it does look, as you note, around our own-source revenue and those sorts of things, but, to take out the fluctuation, it uses a moving average of a couple of years of critical data in terms of the escalators that are built into the formula. So sometimes you will see it both going up, and sometimes you will see it going the other way, but it is to smooth it out, and that is part of the reason why you would see the scenario that you are talking about. In terms of the grant itself, it is a three-year moving average...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. There were certainly lots of views, not only from people in the department, but when we released the approach to the public, as to whether there should be more that goes to families, whether it should be income-tested, and a variety of other things. Yes, there were different views, depending, probably, on their own family situation, but also recognizing what we were trying to do, which is really offset the impact of the carbon pricing as opposed to any other objectives that might be out there. Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Again, I will confirm these dollar values, but it is on a per-person basis. If you have more people in the household, obviously, the value will be higher. If I recall correctly, the value was $260 annually for people who are 18 and over, and $300 for children under the age of 18, dollars a tonne. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. We can get a table, but I will very quickly just sort of remind the Members of some of the things that we are going to be using that money for. First, obviously, is the cost-of-living offset benefit, which will be delivered to residents to help offset the impacts of the carbon pricing. There is the heating fuel rebate so that both residents and small businesses and others will not have to pay carbon tax on heating fuel. Then there are the rebates related to the large emitters, as well, and for electrical generation, but we will provide a table that provides the detailed...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Part of the process that we are going through and one of the first things that we will be working on is we have a rough sense of what should be in an accountability framework and, certainly, departments are very interested to make sure that they don't lose any of the service that they are getting now. We are trying to look at this on a broader sector basis so that we can include accountability around the other components of information systems, but also that information technology and information management as well to come up with a sector-level set of indicators, but we...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I think the initial plan is they will be in three different locations. Some will be in the gallery building. There was already a shared service unit for Lands, ENR, and ITI, and we will use the space that was there. Some will be in the Laing Buildings, where the office of the CIO was. There may be some swapping out of space. Then the third sort of focal point will be in Northwest Tower, what I affectionately call "the green building." There is some space that we were able to get through infrastructure for a third spot there. Obviously, ideally, we would like to have...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, this is the information systems shared services unit, so this is the initiative that we have talked to the committee about, of basically consolidating all of the resources from across government into one unit to do information systems development. Really, the genesis of that was a review that was done and a recognition that there is an awful lot of this work being done in government; often it was not being coordinated particularly well, and you had different departments doing different things, and that led to duplication and those sorts of things. The other thing...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. In terms of the Hydro Corporation and their short-term debt, there were some estimates built-in, and they were quite generous in terms of things that they might have to borrow for. There are some resource-related projects that they've responded to RFPs to provide power there, that they would have to borrow to have the generation available for that. They have some other things out there that they may have to borrow some money on. That was all built-in. Not all of those may necessarily happen, but we wanted to make sure they had the room to be able to do that.

In terms of the...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I am not sure that I know all of the details of exactly what they would get access to. I know that there have been cases where they have been provided things like test scores and those sorts of things, but I don't know the level that they go down to. We could look into that and get back to the Member specifically around the panel's notes and those sorts of things, but I think it is mostly about scoring and that sort of stuff that they would get.

The other thing that we do, and this is outside the appeal process, is that, on every competition for Northerners, if somebody is...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I'll deal with the first line here on short-term debts. Our short-term debt is essentially our cash shortfall, if you like. The main estimates project that, if the short-term debt is going to go from $318 million up to $325 million during the year, with short-term debt, you can imagine a scenario where, for example, if we had a very bad fire season and our supplementary appropriations were much greater than we expected to be. So what this is doing is saying, let's put in a contingency amount so what this Appropriation Act is saying is that, if you need to borrow on short...