Thanks, Mr. Chair. Just very briefly, it is hard to believe that Members have the right to use any official language in the House as a result of the Official Languages Act but it is not actually recognized or incorporated into our rules. This will make sure that the rules reflect the law. It is an important motion, and I expect that everybody is going to vote in favour of this. Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Merci, Monsieur le President. I want to thank the Minister for that, and of course, I'm going to be asking him the same question in May/June. That's a quick heads-up. Look, I'm convinced that we will be punishing Income Assistance recipients who were supposed to have no deductions as a result of CERB payments, who now have to pay it back through garnishees to tax refunds. I think that's just a result of a harsh interpretation of the regulations. Will the Minister exercise some discretion and stop a garnishee on tax refunds as being considered unearned income or change the regulations now to...

Mahsi, Mr. Chair. Just a couple of things. I neglected to thank the interpreters who do such tremendous work for us here in the Assembly. I have known some of them for many years and have great confidence in their ability to help us understand each other a lot better. I neglected to thank them. I also wanted to thank the Member for Monfwi for bringing this matter forward because I think it is going to push us to the next level in terms of making sure that we properly recognize and implement use of official languages in this Assembly. I think that we have come up with a variety of...

I want to thank the Minister for confirming that. Yes, the Minister said that Income Assistance clients can use their annual "unearned income exemption of up to $1,200 to offset the penalty for the garnishee." While this may be true, most people are required to pay back CERB through tax-refund garnishees, and they probably owe a lot more than $1,200. This exemption was meant to offset the occasional gift from family or friends. Will the Minister be lenient in his interpretation of the words "tax refund" in the Income Assistance regulations and not claw back garnishees from tax refunds for CERB...

Thanks, Mr. Chair, and thanks to the Minister for that. I appreciate it, and I look forward to hearing what the public has to say in terms of the revenue side of the equation because I just don't think we've paid enough attention to it. I did neglect to mention one other thing. We need a new arrangement with the federal government where we get to keep more of our source revenues. We've got to start to cut those apron strings from Ottawa and find ways to become more self-sufficient, and that, as I said, means a new fiscal arrangement with Ottawa where we get to keep all or a greater portion of...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Those of us who have been around for a while may remember when we used to have a languages bureau. It was quite an operation. There were probably 40, 50 staff there who were available and doing work in all of the official languages and developing curriculum, all kinds of great work. Unfortunately, we do not have that capacity anymore, or it's still there perhaps in different forms. However, that issue was raised with us as well as the need for better interpreter training and accreditation. That was raised to us in the written submissions, verbal submissions, and it was...

Merci, Monsieur le President. It's tax time again. That's especially important for recipients of Income Assistance, who are required to file tax returns in order to remain eligible. Case officers keep an eye on what tax refunds their clients might be getting. Refunds are considered "unearned income" and the amount of a refund is deducted from the client's monthly amount of income support, even if part of the refund is used to pay off other tax debts. There is an especially cruel twist to this year, thanks to COVID and the federal Canada Emergency Response Benefit, or CERB. When CERB was...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. What I'm trying to reconcile is: clearly corporate income tax is not a great way to try to finance a government, especially when it's bouncing up and down. Look at what was predicted main estimates in the current year, $25 million, and then we're only going to get $1.9 million in the current year? I know the pandemic and so on is going on, but this just doesn't seem to be a very reliable way to, or a completely unpredictable way to get revenues for the government. What is the Minister doing to try to stabilize the revenue side of the equation in some kind of predictable way...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I am not going to read what is on pages 10 and 11, but just to refresh Members' memory and for those who may be listening, there are some immediate changes that we can make. We have started to do some of this, where we try to make sure that we have interpretation available for the entire sitting day, that there are at least a couple of interpreters available; we are going to look at including statistics around use of official languages in the House in future annual reports from the Legislative Assembly, making sure that some of our basic documents are made available in all...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Now that I got all that nice stuff off my chest, I have a few tougher questions for the Minister of Finance. I'm looking at page 135, it's the revenue summary. When I look down at taxation, there is the listing for corporate income tax for 2021-2022 seems to be a negative $8.4 million. Does that mean we are shelling out $8.4 million, we're giving it back to corporations? What does this figure really mean? Thanks, Mr. Chair.