Michael Miltenberger

The Program Review Office was initially designed to address a need for a large corporation, an almost $2 billion corporation, to have some capacity for that internal overview program supervision in terms of design, implementation and audit type function to work with other parts of government to make sure that we do deal with the issues of efficiency, effectiveness and economy. That’s what their role is intended to be and that’s what it is and it’s evolving as we look at it. It’s a very small operation and they need to have these types of agreements or standing offers so they can bring in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We will spend what is needed, so the volume will depend on the temperature. For example, when I came in here Tuesday from Fort Smith, it was about 40 below, and when I came over the hill every smokestack at Jackfish was going flat out with a great big plume of smoke, so it depends on the consumption.

There have been some projected savings with the cost of diesel. Diesel hasn’t come down as much as the price of oil. We’re tracking that. We’ll account for every penny and litre that we use and burn on an as required basis.

Ten million dollars has not gone into the NTPC...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Program Review Office I think has, if my memory serves me correctly, four people. We have 5,000 employees, about 11 or so departments, quite a number of significant sized other agencies, colleges, power corporations, Crown corporations and the sheer volume of things that need to get done require that we need to bring in, from time to time, outside resources because it’s physically impossible for that small number of people to do all the work that’s needed, the work that they’re currently doing as well as try to address some of these bigger, broader issues. Thank you...

Mr. Speaker, this process is started. We’ve been using passive restraint and fiscal prudence discipline. We’ve been working on that. Things have changed in southern jurisdictions that have affected our formula, the original escalator in terms of the money they spend, and other things that are dragging down our formula overall. Our own-source revenues are growing at about 3.7 percent. They’re projected to continue to grow. But when you look at some of the fiscal problems down south with the larger provinces, other provinces where they have severe challenges with their own budgets and debt and...

That issue of some type of enhanced encouragement to address the issue the Member has referred to, increasing our population through birthrate, we’ve had some initial looks at it. We haven’t reached any definitive decisions yet of how we would do that in a way that would really promote that and it would actually show value. We know that in Quebec, I think they offered $3,000 per child. It’s something that’s on our to-do list. We’ve been focusing on some of the more immediate things, but it’s something that has been brought forward.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Clearly, one of the biggest single costs in the government is in fact what we pay for our staff of over 5,000 employees, so having affordable compensation packages are going to be critical on a go-forward basis. As well, we have to clearly collectively look at the vacancy rates and then, by extension, as we’ve talked about but very rarely, move in a comprehensive way. Look if we have to make choices as part of programs and services and what’s critical and more of a priority to us, and if there needs to be some retrenching of our mandate, what would that be. Those are...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have a committee of Cabinet that includes ECE, it includes ITI, Finance, Environment and Natural Resources, just about every department is represented around the table. We’re working on those types of things, the labour market information. We’re tracking the work on the Nominee Program being shepherded and looked at by a Minister. Minister Lafferty will be making an announcement in the House. The commercial fisher piece, we’ve got the money in the budget. The question of are we doing stuff, yes, we’ve also set up a committee that involves all the key industry players...

Thank you. The communities coming down the valley are all going to have a direct fibre link or a microwave link and just about every community that I can think of has the capacity to do telehealth and the schools are all hooked up. What they don’t have is the bandwidth to be able to do it properly. So now we’re going to marry up the fact that we have the infrastructure with the capacity to, in fact, allow them to use telehealth to its full capacity, that students can log on to their computers and do work and not wait half an hour to get on. What’s going to be important in terms of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This whole initiative has been one of acceleration that the federal government and other countries were very interested when we started talking about this project in the last government and they were giving us a lot of verbal support. As we move forward through the last government, late in the last government, but this government where we worked with the Assembly and we ramped up our interest and we’ve moved this project from the political debate to the approval of the money and project design to, as the Member said, the actual start-up of the installation and the fibre...

The first year has been a planning year and we’ve been working with industry and we are looking at changes to the procedures. For example, in Human Resources, where we want to be able to go south to job fairs or recruiting, that we’re going to empower the folks that go down there to look at the resumes and do interviews. If the people meet the criteria, then a conditional job offer can be made pending the checking of references. That’s as opposed to the current process where we have to come back and months go by and people wander away. That’s one thing.

We are expecting and the Minister of ECE...