Sandy Lee

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, further to my statement today, my question goes to the Minister of RWED. Mr. Speaker, I strongly believe that this could have been done much better, that we could be providing the necessary housing for the professionals in the community, but if it was done the right way and if there was plenty of planning going on we could have involved the local businesses. Instead we are in a situation where we have a three-month deadline for the barge in June, and we have to find the cheapest way possible. So, Mr. Speaker, in an ideal world I expect these seven...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight two things that are terribly wrong with the way the Housing Corporation and the Cabinet have exempted themselves from its own BIP. Mr. Speaker, first of all, it’s the lack of input from the regular Members and a major shift in a government policy. Not just the exemption from the BIP, but the major change in the long-held policy of the Housing Corporation. For the entire period of its life, Mr. Speaker, the corporation has insisted on stick built homes rather than mobile homes. This was changed and maybe there...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, would the Minister bring to the table, as Minister responsible for the policy as well as maximizing economic benefits for the money that government spends, information that would counterbalance the apparent saving that we are going to get from buying from a factory in Edmonton, such as the taxes we are going to get, the consumer spending, the contributions that the businesses make, the transfer payments we get from Ottawa? Would the Minister get his people to crunch numbers and do a real cost benefit analysis rather than going for the cheapest? Thank you...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I would much prefer action from the Ministers rather than gratitude. There is something strange that happens in this House. When the Cabinet Ministers get elected they are inflicted instantly with a case of amnesia.

---Laughter

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Bell doesn’t have to do a year of study. He knows all of the issues inside out, upside down pertaining to this. He talked about this. And you know what? He doesn’t need a year of registry study, he could just go out there and talk to the people. I know he got a call this morning, I got a call from a business in...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t believe still that I have gotten the confirmation and clarification on what the net return is to our government at 14 percent. I understand, and I have heard this many times, that there are all sorts of factors that go into this and there is never any certainty on the forecast and the assumptions that the government makes to crunch out numbers. We are just fed like lap dogs, whatever they tell us at any given time is what we get.

Limiting the calculations to the assumptions the government made in drafting this paragraph, I am going to narrow it down to this...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to offer some general comments. I can understand, and I appreciate this debate that we are having and I am listening to what the Members are saying. I am a returning Member, but I think from my experience of having sat through four budgets, and argued the points here for the last four years, if it has taught me anything it is that I cannot accept all of the information that the government feeds us at face value. I don’t mean to imply that the Ministers somehow hide their information or anything like that, it is just the fact that our consensus system of...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to raise this point. If you look at the budget that we just passed for RWED, there were 489 PYs and we know there has to be some vacancies there, five or 10 percent, which could be up to 40 people. I can’t believe that the department with an $89 million budget and 489 PYs has to get a supp to fund $65,000. Why could they not fund this from within? Is this a case of just allocating the budget to just clear the books from their money from within?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to bring the Minister back to the issue at hand. It's good for the Minister to say I support this, I support that, I support this, but I tell you the people out there expect the Ministers to walk the talk and not just say I support the policy except in this case, without any justification. So I have a very specific question to the Minister. As a Minister responsible for this policy and Minister responsible for job creation, economy and economic development and spin-off benefits, would the Minister support giving maximum opportunity to local businesses and...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Could I get some more information on why the Housing Corporation is buying this house and what they are planning to do with this house? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to ask further questions on the BIP and the waiving of BIP by Cabinet. This time, I would like to ask the questions to the Minister of RWED, the lead Minister, the Minister responsible for this policy. Mr. Speaker, I believe the Minister is well aware of the fact that government has spent a lot of money and concentrated efforts on developing, maintaining and operating this BIP. There is a lot of history to that, there's a lot of justification for this policy, and also RWED is the lead department in promoting, working with and sometimes using a lot of...