Michael Miltenberger

When I say “we” the government, it was done through the very capable people in Finance negotiating with Finance Canada. It went through all the due processes with Cabinet and FMB. There were, and I recollect sitting at a number of briefings with committee about the borrowing limit, about what was underway, how things were going, what we were looking at. We’ve also had a number of briefings on the Opportunities Fund and I’m sure we could fill shoeboxes with paper of all that work that was done. That was the deal. The bottom line was the federal government was not prepared to offer us an offset...

Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Madam Chair, it may sound more authoritative if Mr. Kalgutkar says it.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The red tape initiative is going to have two focuses. One focus is going to be, of course, internal within government, and to look for those types of improvements that will speed up processes, in terms of paper, steps required, things that maybe haven’t been reviewed in many years. The one where we think there’s an opportunity to do good work is, as the Premier indicated, we’ve consistently been ranked very low by the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, for example, in terms of the red tape. We think some of that is tied into the federal government, but we want...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The loan was public. It was very topical and extensively covered in the newspaper. The loan was repaid in full early and I indicated what the interest rate was. I don’t know. I’ll ask Mr. Kalgutkar. I don’t think we have that detail. So we don’t have that detail on that particular loan here. It’s been wrapped up and paid off for some time, but that information is available and I agree to provide it to committee if that’s their wish. Thank you.

Thank you. The discussion with the federal government, they made it clear to us that they were not going to cover off the Opportunities Fund under the borrowing limit. We had an arrangement prior to that, it was satisfactory and worked fine, that the Auditor General said was fine and the federal government, Finance Canada said in their opinion they disagreed and this would become part of our borrowing limit. We are not in a position to do that, so we made the decision, we were negotiating an increase to our borrowing limit. It wasn’t going to be bumped up enough to accommodate the...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Over the last few months Executive Council and Members of the Legislative Assembly have been working hard on a compressed 2012-13 planning schedule.

This included the review of departmental 2012-13 business plans in April and consideration of the 2012-13 Main Estimates in Committee of the Whole during the Third Session.

As part of their review, Members of this House have recommended amendments to the 2012-13 budget.

The Financial Management Board has considered these recommendations. Based on our discussions, we are prepared to make the following adjustments:

With...

I apologize if I seem like I’m being obtuse or a little slow here. We get the money and we pay 1.4 percent.

Thank you, Madam Chair. This is the Residential Power Subsidy Program.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d have to ask the Member to clarify the interest rate that we would lend to ourselves, that we’d lend to other people or other businesses?