Michael Miltenberger

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’ll speak to the ENR and then I’ll turn over the nurse practitioner question to Mr. Beaulieu.

My response to the Member for Sahtu will be very similar to the one I just gave to the Member for Frame Lake regarding the front end. We bring the fire crews on; we bring all the aircraft on. It’s a very time-specific, seasonally oriented situation. It’s definitely, if not demand driven, it’s driven by the weather and very many factors. Dryness, rain, lightning, those type of things. It’s an emergency essential service in many cases. We need to be fully operational April 1st...

I have considerable concern about talking about the details of a file and specific figures and all the issues related to that in this forum. I’m very happy to talk to the Member about this. The Member and I have had numerous discussions about this. I recognize the concern about Mr. Patterson, but I am not in the position, I don’t believe, as Minister, to discuss details of individual files. Thank you.

The Member is correct.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We commit the full value of the contract – it’s a short-term contract – then it’s paid out on an as required basis. If you need a whole whack of aircraft support – for example, they had huge grass fires in Alberta in February of last year – you have to put your resources to work. You never know what the demand is going to be. If we weren’t doing this interim appropriation it wouldn’t be a question; it would be in the budget, we would be doing the work. The fact that we’re doing a three-month interim appropriation brings into question only for that reason why this isn’t...

I think the Member and I are reaching the point of agreement. Let me commit again that the work that’s been agreed to that’s underway will continue until it is changed by the discussion or a decision in this Legislature through the business planning process. The work on the family and children’s services committees was committed to and is underway for the five committees. The student financial assistance work is underway and will be brought back into this Legislature through the proper processes, as will all the other work, the mental health work. All that work is still underway, waiting and...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. How the estimates are done on taxes and why these things happen is a separate discussion, but in effect what we had here over the last number of years is an interest-free loan on which we’re now repaying the balance of the principle.

Madam Chair, clearly the government was part of the discussion in the Cabinet, the agreement for interim appropriation, the understanding being is we continue to fund the government to do the work it is doing until it gets us to the point for this new Assembly to build and put their fingerprints on the business planning process for this coming year. Our commitment is that we are continuing that program. It is a status quo budget. The work that is underway is still underway. This is not a blank cheque for Ministers or the Cabinet to make any changes. Our job is to keep the ship of state pointed...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. No, this will not affect our long-term borrowing or debt. Our current fiscal strategy will remain in place. All this gives us basically is a tool that allows us to manage the $1.4 billion that flows in and out of government in its very many different ways through the Consolidated Revenue Fund, as Mr. Kalgutkar pointed out. Recognizing how long it’s been since the last increase with the growth in government and the amount of money that now flows through there and some of the pressures that we’ve been managing as of late just with the economic downturn and a lot of the...

Madam Chair, the purpose of the interim appropriation was to give the government enough money to run so that we can go through the business planning process in the intervening months following this session to get us to the May/June budget session to have time for the committees to review all the business plans of all the departments. The debate and discussion about what should be in the business plans, what should be in the budget going forward, that’s a discussion we have to have. We’ve taken, as I indicated in my opening comments, basically a third of the budget and we’re putting it to use...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. From Finance I have with me Mr. Michael Aumond and Mr. Sandy Kalgutkar.